IP Telephony: Your Path, Your Pace, Your Choice

How can companies migrate to IP telephony and optimize their enterprise? Do IT executives know that some choices will typically let them use most of the infrastructure they already have? Finding the right partner that delivers IP telephony without sacrificing flexibility, reliability, security, and interoperability—all while leveraging existing investments—is the key.


Deploying IP telephony enables a globally distributed enterprise to communicate and to operate as one integrated entity. This allows new business models to emerge that increase productivity and speed business change, all on a single network.

The question for any business is how to implement this critical technology. One approach preserves a company’s infrastructure investment.

Another builds it from scratch. It’s important to support either path while protecting a company’s investment.

The challenge for IT managers is to leverage existing applications, user-training, and infrastructure investments while deploying new solutions that will meet their future
needs. Let’s look at different ways that companies can determine the right path and pace for attaining the benefits of IP telephony.

Consider an enterprise that wants to build a totally distributed IP telephony solution from the ground up. Its ambitious plans include bringing the benefits of IP telephony to an interactive call center and enabling voicemail for thousands of employees. Customers like this look to Consolidated Technologies, Inc. (CTI) and Avaya for flexibility and stability and are eager to leverage its extensive experience and software capabilities.

The Truth About IP Telephony

IT managers trying to make the right choice, at the right pace, about IP telephony need facts—not confusing terms and competing claims. The truth is, decisions are driven by how applications and capabilities match business needs while meeting IT requirements for reliability, security, interoperability, and manageability.

The IP telephony market has coalesced around a common architecture consisting of open servers, highly distributed gateways that connect IP and traditional elements, and a broad range of new access devices, including IP phones, wireless phones, softphones, PDAs, and more.

A CTI fully distributed IP telephony solution can either be completely new or can extend existing investments in applications, servers, gateways, and phones. CTI also provides “stepping-stone” choices for IP-enabling existing PBXs, allowing customers to get started at low risk and cost. All these choices provide flexibility in supporting an organization’s path to IP telephony.

Playing Games With Words

Don’t be thrown off track by the name game. Terms such as clientserver telephony, telephony-enabled LAN, pure IP telephony, converged telephony, and LAN telephony all describe the same fundamental, distributed IP telephony architecture. Simply put, CTI supports both distributed (client-server) IP telephony and IP-enabled PBXs without forcing customers to compromise on either approach.

As IT managers explore IP telephony options, they can reduce risks and missteps by considering five core competencies when evaluating potential partners and alternative solutions by asking the following questions:

1. How extensive is the vendor’s experience—beyond IP telephony? Would you qualify its suite of communications applications as “narrow” or “broad”?

Not all communications software is created equal. The distinguishing characteristic is how the depth of its features and functions help enable an optimized enterprise. CTI partners with Avaya, who has been the telephony industry leader for decades. This has given it time to develop a wide range of capabilities, create the industry’s broadest suite of communications applications, and introduce numerous innovations that can significantly improve the way an enterprise operates and competes. CTI offers applications which increase access and productivity for remote and mobile workers. Using speech commands from any phone, web browser or PDA users can call, conference, schedule tasks/ appointments and access messages while other applications bring the capabilities of the desk set to the cell phone or laptop.

CTI also understands that communications applications determine business value. Communications should improve employee productivity, increase company responsiveness, drive business efficiencies, and deliver better business results. Contact center software from Avaya, for example, is second to none in helping businesses route specific customers to the right customer service agent through features like skills-based routing.

2. Does the vendor offer comprehensive service and support that takes customers from initial network assessments through deployment and beyond?

Moving to IP telephony is not a transition to be undertaken lightly. New demands will be placed on the corporate network, and IT staff will have to come up to speed on sophisticated communications applications. That’s why CTI makes comprehensive assessments of multivendor networks and helps develop optimization strategies, scrutinizing security and evaluating continuity planning.

CTI uses an array of specialized tools that perform assessments to address a company’s business requirements. These tools model applications, infrastructure, and subnets, simulate traffic for what-if analyses, and monitor performance.

3. What steps has the vendor taken to ensure that IP telephony meets the security, reliability, management, and business continuity requirements for mission-critical communications?

IT managers are seeking the integration benefits of a single network, but must also ensure that new IP telephony solutions meet mission-critical availability requirements. From the beginning, CTI is available to support enterprises in designing, implementing, and managing their security and business continuity strategies.

Using hardened Linux servers, with intrusion detection that guards against viruses, along with redundant selfmonitoring servers and gateways with fast automatic failover, CTI increases the reliability of critical IP telephony communications. Further, end-to-end media encryption protects each IP call from eavesdropping. For remote locations, full-featured “local survivability” keeps business running and people productive through network outages and even longer disaster-related challenges. CTI can even speed up problem resolution with remote monitoring and diagnosis, keeping systems running and proactively scheduling maintenance. Avaya integrated applications and high scalability also reduce the number of servers, simplifying management and redundancy planning.

4. How has the vendor maximized the choices available to customers?

Customers have every right to expect more, rather than less, from their IP telephony deployments. Avaya takes a “no compromise” approach to this, delivering more than 700 features as part of its IP architecture. With such extensive offerings, CTI helps ensure that every customer can select the feature set that will let it optimize its business as quickly and efficiently as possible. This depth of functionality and capability is further proof that its solutions are built with current and future needs in mind. The Avaya communications architecture also supports a broad mix of end-points. These include IP, digital, and analog phones, PCs and PDAs, and even CDMA/TDMA/GSM mobile phones. This is not a “retrograde” approach, as some claim, but one of flexibility that can help meet an array of communication requirements.

5. Does the vendor actively support open standards?

CTI and Avaya strongly supports and uses industry standards and optimizes its applications to run on nearly any vendor’s network with its open-architecture approach. This prevents customers from being locked into a single-vendor strategy. It also gives them the freedom to choose best-of-breed applications running on best-of-breed networks.

Finally, CTI takes a consistently multivendor approach, not just with its applications but also with its consulting services and diagnostic tools. It’s prepared to take on any problem with any of Avaya's products, regardless of the equipment or infrastructure on which it's deployed.

Making the best choices about optimizing the enterprise means having as many options as possible to pick from. CTI offers its customers unmatched freedom and flexibility, whether they want to roll out IP telephony as rapidly as possible or pace themselves so they can preserve their infrastructure investment and slowly migrate business processes. For example, MultiVantage Communications Applications can be tailored to match specific feature sets, whether they require IP telephony and contact centers or full-blown business continuity. Similarly, CTI has the right hardware for any job, including S8700 Media Servers for large enterprises and IP Office for small to midsize operations. And thanks to the CTI's staff of highly trained professionals, customers are never forced to make any decision—from the smallest to the largest—on their own. CTI is always there to listen and advise.



For more information on how IP Telephony could benefit your business model, please call Consolidated Technologies at 1-888-477-4CTI today!