Voice over IP implementation in the enterprise is lagging behind expectations partly because several factors - deregulation, economies of scope and scale, and the outsourcing trend - have shifted the momentum to the service provider market.
"Cisco and other companies are trying to persuade enterprises that voice over IP is the way to go on the campus, but there is hardly a groundswell of demand from users," says Tom Valovic, research manager at IDC in Framingham, Mass. The activity, the excitement, and the sense of promise are all in the service provider space, where providers and vendors are caught up in re-inventing the public network.
"If enterprises are going to adopt voice over IP on a large scale, service-provider-driven applications will be the Trojan Horse that leads to it," predicts Valovic.
This raises the question of whether companies shouldn't just outsource voice over IP altogether. With an IP Centrex approach, the legacy voice equipment on enterprise networks is no longer a stumbling block, and voice over IP can be introduced incrementally with very little risk and with minimal disruption to users.
"Unified messaging is a tremendous benefit for road warriors, who can pick up any kind of message at any time with any device," says Keith Cooper, CEO of FaxNet Corp. in Boston. "But is this a benefit that is going to be created in your office through an IP PBX? I don't think so. It will be in the network - a service you buy."
Nokia Internet Communications in Mountain View, Calif., agrees, and is packaging IP Centrex solutions for service providers.
"Big companies have lots of little locations, and some of them are using ISPs to provide standard data footprints as they upgrade offices or add new ones," says Dan MacDonald, vice president of marketing for Nokia Internet Communications. "So we say, 'consider making voice part of that footprint.'"
Voice over IP enthusiasts also point to the speed of technological change, which is increasing the risk factor for big infrastructure deployments. If you have to start replacing facilities every two years instead of every five or ten, the total-cost-of-ownership argument for outsourcing becomes a lot more compelling.
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