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The idea of conducting all your telephone calls over the public Internet and avoiding high long distance charges from the Telco in the process is an attractive one for any budget-conscious CIO. However, voice quality and reliability have been big issues for the most VoIP services, adding to the different kind of VoIP vendors in the market, kept many organizations’ CIOs a little confuse in discovering the best VoIP products or solutions which best suites the organization’s requirements.
The compelling factor behind the implementation of VoIP is a practical one: cost. Long distance charges can cost businesses thousands of dollar every month. If the business has a fixed cost, with unlimited access connection to the internet, calls transmitted over that connection can be effectively free. But, why many business CIOs still feel hesitant and uncertain to abandon the public telephone network and make calls over IP?
While the IP hardware vendors and IP system integrators are trying to move closer to true interoperability of any IP platform, VoIP service providers are largely moving in the opposite direction, disintegration the potentials of IP solutions into fragments. These IP service providers are giving very attractive packages to the corporate organizations even at the cost of zero initial investment. This invites CIOs to jump into the VoIP bandwagon without identifying their organizations’ needs and requirements on VoIP solutions, but later found out that what they had deployed does not meet their organizations’ requirements and lead to a dubious view on future VoIP deployments.
Any true IP vendor who is familiar with voice and data integration with IP platform will definitely assist the SME, SMI and the corporate organizations to see the whole picture of IP potentialities instead of just having cheaper call rates. These true IP vendors will emphasis on reliability, security, voice quality, interoperability, integration with the current work flow, transparency, ease of use, expandability and all these can be deployed at a very affordable price.
The factors which any organization’s CIO should look into are:
Initial setup cost – Although there are low cost and even free means to transmit voice over IP, an enterprise level organization that is serious about VoIP will have to invest on a more reliable and quality VoIP products that meet the enterprise level requirements.
Voice quality and reliability issues – It is always a waste of time, money and man-power to test and purchase gateway products which do not produce telco grade voice quality. A product which is not reliable and flexible will definitely jeopardize the organization work-flow especially during critical moments.
Security issues – CIOs who are implementing the VoIP solutions in a bid to cut communications costs should not overlook the security risks that can crop up when the VoIP users are getting larger. Most CIOs are more concerned about the voice quality, the delay and the latency, that they have overlooked the dangers of unsecured VoIP services. In fact, the voice packets should be encrypted and run it over a VPN (Virtual Private Network).
Incompatibility issues – Some services require that both the caller and the called party be subscribers to their service, where there are some software programs to be installed at both parties’ computers, in order to conduct VoIP. However, there are also some other services allow you to call anyone, including calling to a regular phone at a certain fix cost per month. But then again, are all these compatible with the current organization workflow?
Any wise CIO will definitely evaluate the employees’ telephony needs and will always run a pilot program first, testing VoIP with a small group of users, before rolling out a VoIP solution to the entire organization. In most organizations, normally the ratio of phone calls from the employees compared to the middle and top management will be at 80:20. The employees are the ones that call the most often in order to conduct their work. Therefore, it will be no point for any organization to just deploy the VoIP applications for the top management only, but a wiser choice to have the deployment to benefits all parties in the organization.
Different kinds of VoIP applications serve different nature of business. CIOs of any organization need to identify their organization’s needs and requirements on VoIP solutions, before jumping onto the band wagon. Always ask, can we invest on $ 30,000 and later found out that it would not work, and then invest another $ 50,000 for better and more reliable equipment?
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