If your business hasn’t yet taken the plunge to IP Telephony, then time is running out. Manufacturers are rapidly replacing their phone systems with IP-based ones, which means that spares for older systems will become harder to get and upgrades and patches will eventually stop. The momentum is unstoppable and inevitable. Even BT are ripping out their UK digital phone network and replacing it with an IP voice infrastructure as part of their ‘21CN’ project.

 

So what’s the problem? Surely it’s just a new phone system?

 

Well, no. IP phones do look like a normal office phone but that is where the similarity stops. IP phones are, in fact, small computers that connect to your PC network, but just happen to look like phones. Pretty much everything about IP telephony is different and you need to be prepared for the change over.

 

So where are the risks?

 

Your PC network: Phone systems usually have had their own voice network to guarantee call quality. IP telephony instead runs over the PC network so your phone calls are now fighting for space against e-mail, web browsing, basically everything that your staff use their computers for. When the network gets busy, IP telephony systems can fail.

 

Your phone numbers: You will want to keep your existing phone numbers, but these will be with a traditional phone supplier like BT. To move these numbers over to a IP telephony provider is possible but is fraught with logistical and regulatory problems. And if it goes wrong, you can end up with disconnected numbers that don’t go anywhere.

 

Hidden costs: The majority of costs associated with IP telephony are with maintenance and software upgrades. All of the major IP telephony vendors make significant profit from ongoing upgrades to the core system. To maximise this they frequently release new versions of software that you must eventually upgrade to otherwise they will not support you. These upgrade costs are not trivial and can be £100,000+ for a large phone system.

 

The transition process to IP: Your phone system is the communication lifeblood of your organisation, and moving 100s or even 1000s of users to a brand new phone system without dropping a call is major logistical challenge. Not only are the technical issues of installing a new IT system significant, but how calls flow around your organisation – hunt groups, help desks, switchboard, etc – needs to be replicated exactly between the old system and the new.

 

Technical support: Once this new phone system is in place, who will look after it? Your current phone system could well be looked after by the facilities team, whereas your computer network and systems are looked after by IT, which is the natural place for IP telephony. But does your IT department understand phone systems? Who is going to help them get up to speed?

 

However there are a number of providers that are offering a complete shrink-wrapped, managed IP telephony service to address these issues, and this model is rapidly growing in popularity. Instead of buying a PBX with all the associated costs and risks, you agree a fixed monthly charge per employee. Like all managed services, it is supported by a 24x7 technical team and the monthly charge is guaranteed not to increase over the duration of the contract – there are no nasty surprises or bills for upgrades.

 

The migration from your existing system to IP will be professionally project managed by the supplier and you can usually phase it over months to reduce the impact. A major advantage of a managed service over a PBX is that it can be introduced one phone at a time which minimises the risk associated with traditional ‘rip and replace’  scenarios.  Unlike your in-house IT team, your managed service provider will have done this migration many times before with other customers and know how to avoid the pitfalls. And because the provider is responsible for looking after the system both at installation and during the contract, they have the job of paying for all the expensive IT people to maintain it, not you.

 

The managed service model is not for everyone but it is a serious alternative to the IP PBX and much less expensive than you may think. And with the clock ticking on your old phone system, it could be one way of diffusing the IP telephony timebomb.

 

Richard Quine, Director of Product Management, InTechnology