Although IP telephony is now seen as a
mainstream rather than an emerging technology, it is nevertheless a disruptive one and one that many enterprises have not yet deployed. For this reason, enterprises may have some concerns about it. The following Q&A highlights some of the concerns that Cisco hears most often from potential customers, and the view that managed service providers should take.
Q. Is there really a business case for IP telephony?
A.There is unquestionably a business case for IP telephony, and transparent ROI models such as the one used by Cisco can help companies to develop their own case in some detail. However, each case depends not only on short-term cost savings but also on the longer-term value of the solution to the customer’s business. This is a more subtle area that can include gains such as productivity, customer service, and organisational agility. Finally, some customers are deterred from moving to IP telephony by the up-front investment required – much of this can be avoided by outsourcing the service(s), as well as by using leasing as part of the overall proposition to the customer.
Q. Cisco IP phones are too expensive.
A. Firstly, Cisco manufactures a wide range of IP phones that are available in the low, mid and high-end price brackets – with feature sets
appropriate to their pricing. Secondly, it is important to consider the cost of the overall IP telephony solution, not individual components such as the phone, as this does not give a true picture. For example, IP phones connect directly to Ethernet without needing a PBX line card and chassis, so one switch port and one set of wiring can support both a PC and an IP phone. As a general rule, it is impossible to make direct comparisons between IP telephony and PBX environments because you are never comparing
‘like with like’.
Q. Is IP telephony as mature and reliable as my PBX?
A.Let’s deal with the issue of maturity first. By 2007, Gartner expects traditional PBX manufacturers to have ceased development (although not necessarily production) of their TDM-based PBX and contact centre systems, and to have announced their intention to discontinue support for those systems within five years. IP-based technologies are already starting to establish their dominance in the market; by 2007, Gartner expects that 60 per cent of phones will be IP.
The issue of reliability is more complex, as all TDM-based PBXs are wrongly assumed to offer
‘five 9s’. In fact, only the biggest PBXs can offer 99.999 per cent reliability and they need total redundancy to achieve it, which is very expensive.
Another common, and related, misconception is
that data networks never achieve more than 99.5 per cent availability. In fact, Cisco has been building networks that achieve ‘five 9s’ for years; as with any infrastructure, it is about achieving a balance between costs and levels of redundancy. The key to the reliability of Cisco IP Communications solutions is their distributed architecture: unlike traditional telephony, the load is spread across multiple distributed devices that back each other up, instead of depending solely on one single large PBX.
Finally, Cisco has developed new features in its IOS networking software to ensure that a resilient IP telephony solution can be delivered to remote offices. Survivable Remote Site Telephony (SRST) is able to dynamically and without manual configuration back-up Cisco CallManager during outage periods caused by a loss of connectivity to a customer’s site.
Q. Why can’t I migrate to IP telephony by simply attaching IP phones and trunks to my legacy PBX?
A. This approach, also called a hybrid solution or IP-enabled PBX, really delivers very limited advantages. Customers are still left with a TDM platform that has all the same issues of limited scalability, poor integration and high maintenance costs. They will also need to make the decision to replace their PBX with IP at some stage in the future. A key benefit of making that decision now is that customers are investing in their future: they
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will be able to start adding new applications, services and users on to the IP-based system very quickly and cost effectively. For customers who are concerned about the accounting implications of replacing their PBX, Cisco Capital may be able to buy the PBX at its book value, thereby eliminating any accounting write-offs.
Q. Isn’t IP telephony less secure than a PBX?
A. Security touches all network components, so should be an integral part of any company’s networking strategy whether voice is run on that network or not. Cisco is the world’s largest provider of security solutions for networks, with a comprehensive range of products that offer end-to-end protection against all known
vulnerabilities. Cisco is a market leader in encryption, VPN, firewall and access security. Its IP telephony security technologies include anti-virus and
intrusion protection software on Cisco CallManager, in addition to the security that is embedded in all its voice and data networking components. In fact by embedding security in the network and
encrypting voice calls, an IP telephony deployment can be made more secure than a PBX.
Q. How do I migrate from legacy PBXs, voice mail solutions and ACDs to IP telephony?
A. Cisco IP Communications solutions are able to work in parallel with TDM-based PBXs and ACDs,
as they support all the protocols used throughout the EMEA region including DPNSS (in the UK), Q.SIG (European standard), and ISDN primary rate interface and basic rate interfaces (PRI and BRI).
They also support the key interfaces between IP PBXs and the PSTN such as SS7, H.323, SIP and MGCP.
Applications such as Cisco IP Contact Centre and Cisco Unity also offer completely transparent interoperation between PBX and IP telephony systems. So tight is the integration between Cisco IPCC and TDM-based systems that no changes are required to the architecture – interoperability is primarily a scripting exercise.
Q. Is voice quality not as good with IP telephony?
A. This was a real concern in the early days of Voice over IP, but it relates only to the transmission of VoIP using the public Internet. The Internet does not support Quality of Service, so it delivers very poor speech quality. Cisco IP telephony solutions are run over networks in which QoS policies are applied to the traffic. Voice is given the highest priority, so the quality is as good as, if not better than, voice on a traditional PBX.
It is important to bear in mind that QoS is an end-to-end concept: every single network device involved in a telephone call must support QoS features in order to achieve high-quality voice.
Q. Why should I buy a voice solution from Cisco;
aren’t they data specialists?
A. The statistics speak for themselves. In October 2003, MZA found that Cisco was number one in the IP telephony market in Western Europe and number seven in the total voice market above 100 lines.
In August 2003, Gartner placed Cisco as a market leader in EMEA corporate enterprise telephony, based on its completeness of vision and ability to execute.
Cisco IP Communications is deployed in mission-critical environments such as 2,600 IP phones in Landspitali Hospital in Iceland and Reality Group (retailer) which has a 3,000 agent contact centre based on Cisco IPCC. Other major enterprise deployments include Abbey (a major UK retail bank), Heinz, Lloyds of London and Roche.
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Q. How do you ensure data integrity in a hosted contact centre system?
A. IP Contact Centre allows applications and databases to be hosted in the managed service provider’s secure data centre or located at the customer’s site. This is also true of the ICM routing server. These options allow for a flexible model in which customers manage and secure their own CRM data and routing scripts. Following
discussions with the managed service provider, the optimal model for each customer can be deployed to ensure the appropriate levels, server and data integrity and security.
Q. I don’t have distributed agents, so why do I need IP Contact Centre?
A. IP Contact Centre allows companies to make more continuous use of agents’ time by combining multiple contact media such as email and voice.
IPCC enables cost-effective desk moves or workforce expansion because new agents can be seated wherever there is an Ethernet port. Cost savings can be made through IVR treatment and queuing of incoming calls at the edge of the IP network, allowing them to be handled as a local call even if the final agent destination is
international. IPCC also reduces time-to-market on new services and campaigns through its support for standards-based IVR applications, integration of Advanced Speech Recognition, and CTI applications that integrate CRM and other data sources.
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It is worth bearing in mind that the market has moved on since VoIP first became available in the mid to late 1990s. The majority of
enterprises now acknowledge that they will move to a converged, IP-based environment within the next few years. In addition, they have seen evidence of IP telephony being used successfully in mission-critical
environments so have fewer concerns about issues such as reliability or speech quality.
As a result, account managers may begin to see a change in the objections that are raised by enterprises. Specifically they may find that companies are increasingly more interested in the value that IP telephony – and IP Communications – can add to their business. In this regard, the Cisco portfolio brings many advantages over its competitors, as this toolkit has shown.
Account managers will, therefore, find themselves talking about issues such as simplifying the customer’s world and reducing opportunity times for a business. Much of that value is added by offering a hosted or managed IP Communications service. For some customers, outsourcing telephony services will seem like a radical idea and account managers may encounter objections. This toolkit explains the key benefits of hosted and managed IP Communications in its section on ‘Managed service versus DIY’.
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