Vendors up the volume on VoIP

SEATTLE - This week's Voice on the Net show will feature new wares that help customers mix legacy phone gear with an IP PBX, add multimedia communications to call centers and better integrate the latest voice-over-IP technologies with existing network and security infrastructures.

The heightened vendor activity comes as customer appetites for large-scale IP telephony are growing, experts say.

"Last year, we saw a lot of clients doing tiny proof-of-concept types of implementations in places where they could ring a fence around the VoIP activity in a particular area and not worry about it degrading the network," says Ric Hughes, an IT consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers. "Over the last three months, client activity has moved toward full-blown implementations."

That movement will be seen front-and-center at VON.

Citel, a U.K. maker of VoIP gateways, will show off its CitelLink Handset Gateway card, which will let digital PBX phones tie into a 3Com NBX IP PBX system. Scheduled to be released in June, the module will fit into an available 3Com NBX 100 chassis and let 16 digital phone ports access the NBX system (for about $125 per digital phone). The device will support Nortel digital handsets in its first release; later releases are planned to support other vendors' digital phones, the company says. Other vendors that mix digital phones with VoIP include MCK Communications and Shoreline Communications.

Most common features of the NBX, such as call transfer, hold, speed dial and voice mail retrieval, will be available on digital phones attached to the system. The product is targeted at businesses interested in buying an IP-based phone system, but unwilling to roll out IP phones to every desktop.

The idea of mixing an IP PBX with existing digital handsets is appealing to Steve Sharrock, IS manager at Portage Path Behavioral Health in Akron, Ohio. Sharrock recently installed 3Com's NBX in two of the mental health clinic's five offices and is looking to eventually replace all the company's ADIX PBX systems with the 3Com gear.

"If I could replace an old [phone system] and not have to replace the phones, that would be great," Sharrock says. "The programming is a nightmare on any key system. One of the things I like about NBX is the ability to change the configuration easily."

Because his company is nonprofit, Sharrock is always looking for ways to reuse or integrate existing equipment with new gear.

"Recouping my investment in old phones and having all the graphical management of the NBX would be pretty slick," he says.

Support for call centers

For large call centers, Aspect Communications will launch IP Contact Center 1.1 at VON. Aspect has added support for H.323, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and media gateway control protocol phones to IP Contact Center. Also added are unified voice and e-mail messaging support for call center agents and e-mail integration with Lotus Domino servers.

Aspect's earlier IP Contact Center release supported only a softphone application with a PC running Microsoft NetMeeting or digital desktop phones tied to the IP Contact Center through a circuit-switched PBX trunk. The new software supports standards-based IP phones from vendors such as Cisco and Polycom.

Voice messaging on the IP Contact Center will let customers leave a voice mail for a customer call agent. The voice mails are converted to digital audio files, and can be routed to the call agent's Lotus Notes inbox or Microsoft Outlook inbox. (IP Contact Center previously supported only Outlook.) The software will cost between $2,000 and $6,000 per agent, and will be available in May.

With so many options for IP telephony now available, businesses are starting to accept convergence as the next step in business phone systems, industry watchers say. Last year, the average IP telephony rollout increased to 68 IP handsets per install - up from 42 the year before, according to In-State/MDR. IP PBX line shipments are expected to rise more than 700% by 2004, while traditional PBX line shipments will decrease around 20% over the same time period (see graphic, above).

Traditionally, VON has focused on packet telephony in carrier networks, but this week's show will feature many enterprise twists. Included will be the daylong VON Enterprise Forum; a three-day enterprise VoIP session track and the Network World VoIP Showdown, in which representatives from Alcatel, Avaya, Nortel and Shoreline will participate in a presidential-style debate about enterprise VoIP hosted by John Dix, Network World editor in chief.

Other vendors making announcements at VON include: