manufacturer who has a large amount of seasonal sales, you don’t want to go live with a wide-scale VoIP rollout in your call centers around Christmas. But in areas where VoIP’s kinks can be worked out, and the work can still get done (meaning delays in phone calls and intermittent service won’t kill the company), VoIP makes a lot of sense. Oster-man Research claims that just one in 10 U.S. companies has already deployed VoIP, though it predicts that by late 2007, 45 percent of companies will have deployed some type of VoIP.
Problems and challenges lie around every corner when it comes to VoIP implementations. Here are three things to remember, courtesy of “Don’t Let VoIP Throw You,” in the Nov. 15 issue of CIO.
1. Organizational mess
VoIP works across wide area and local area networks, which many companies handle through different budgets and departments when IT and telecom groups are separate.
TIP: Companies may have to reorganize internally before developing a companywide VoIP strategy.
2. Network traffic trouble
It’s not unusual for performance problems to creep in as you add VoIP users or sites. “The most important decision anyone who is considering implementing VoIP can make is how they will ‘live’ with it after the installation is completed,” says Forrester Research analyst Lisa Pierce.
TIP: Make sure you have comprehensive Vo IP monitoring and management tools, and staff expertise before rollout. If you can’t afford these, consider managed or hosted services, Pierce advises.
3. Tough business case
Moving to VoIP typically means network upgrades. But VoIP may not be top on the list of networking upgrades, especially with telecom budgets growing more slowly than IT budgets. Meanwhile, conventional long-distance rates are plummeting; undercutting what has been VoIP’s biggest advantage.
TIP: Piggybacking on a network redesign may help. Keep a close eye on the VoIP dollars and sense as phone rates change.
Tom Wailgum is a senior editor at cIo.com.
Voice over Ip (VoIp) projects often stall during or after pilot testing. here’s hands-on advice from cIos who kept their projects running.
Long before the Vonage IPO turned into the year’s worst use of investor money, CIOs had started feeling chilly about voice over IP (VoIP).
In fact, after 2005 studies showed that 32 percent of American firms were piloting VoIP, a Forrester Research survey in August 2006 showed that adoption rates were flat from the same period a year earlier. Forrester Research analyst Lisa Pierce declares that enterprise VoIP deployments in the United States “have stalled.”
The reasons why will sound familiar to most CIOs: organizational deadweight, technology fear, uncertainty and doubt, and competing demands on network upgrading funds. But you can get through a VoIP pilot without stalling. We talked to CIOs who’ve done it, to look at some common and unexpected trouble spots, plus get advice on how to avoid or conquer them.
The problem: Can you manage a VoIP network with your existing staff once it’s in place?
The answer: Be prepared for a few glitches, and get hands-on wisdom during install.
VoIP is supposed to make the phone system better, not make it stop ringing. But one early side effect of the way a new VoIP system had been implemented at Serta Mattress was causing phones to stop ringing for as long as 20 minutes at some of its factories.
For the not-so-sleepy mattress maker, VoIP emerged as a potential answer to the problem of rapid growth during the 1990s. Ambitious and judicious management took a mattress factory with a Serta license and built it up to the point where it acquired Serta itself: By 2003, the company had gone from three facilities to 23. Each of them had a telephone system (a PBX, in phone parlance), and each a maintenance contract, eating up between $500 and $1,000 per month.
Donna Zett, CIO at Serta, thought VoIP would give her a way to run a single PBX system, based at company headquarters in Hoffman Estates, Ill. That would save the company a bundle on maintenance, for starters (its VoIP system now costs it about $2,000 a month in maintenance). And since an internal study showed that 60 percent of its long-distance calls were between facilities, VoIP promised Serta savings on phone bills too.
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