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Quote: By Mark Long
"When you take a look at hosted services, you are taking the call system off the customer's premises and putting it into the data center," said Ted Chamberlin, Gartner's principal analyst for the communications group. "One issue is that when you outsource, then it is out of your control."
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Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) Latest News about VoIP is an outstanding technology when it works. But whenever the power goes off or the broadband Latest News about Broadband connection runs out of steam, an enterprise's voice links can come to a crashing halt. Moreover, placing emergency 911 calls using VoIP continues to be a nagging concern. What can I.T. managers do to overcome VoIP's outstanding issues?
The first thing to do is to ascertain the overall health of a network, advised Bill Miller, 3Com Latest News about 3Com senior director of product line management. "Many times, when a problem occurs on networks already running into quality-of-service issues, people will think it is the phone's fault, when it's actually because their old network does not run VoIP very well," Miller said.
For this reason, companies like 3Com offer voice-assessment services to enterprises that want to know just where their networks stand. "Within a few hours, we can do a complete analysis to see what problems the network has and what needs to be done to fix them," Miller added.
Network Reliability
But how reliable must a network be to run VoIP? The "five nines" of reliability is a basic requirement of traditional voice networks, noted Gartner Research Latest News about Gartner Vice President Jeff Snyder. The term "five nines" refers to the goal set by traditional phone companies to reach 99.999 percent service uptime, which translates into 5.3 minutes ofdowntime Latest News about downtime per year or less.
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"But with VoIP, you no longer are sending voice over a dedicated network," Snyder said. "It's going over the same pipe as everything else."
Snyder explained that, given that voice is a mission-critical application for most businesses, it is up to the I.T. manager to build in the level of network reliability that he or she thinks the enterprise will require. He suggested that network managers ask themselves several important questions to determine the level of network strength needed for VoIP deployments.
# How much redundancy and how many backup servers do they need to address remote survivability?
# Should they have backup power supplies in the event that the network goes down?
# Do they want to have a backup voice server or some other strategy in place at each of their work locations?
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Once the I.T. manager fully understands just how much reliability is required, "make it part of an overall deployment strategy rather than merely a reactive issue," Snyder advised.
Emergency Calling
In addition to general network reliability, another outstanding issue associated with VoIP deployments -- at home or in enterprise settings -- is calling emergency 911, orE911 Latest News about E911, services.
Earlier this year, the FCC ordered VoIP carriers to provide E911 capabilities to their subscribers and further required those carriers to notify customers of the circumstances under which E911 service might not be available through the interconnected VoIP service or might be limited in comparison to traditional 911 services.
As a result of this mandate, most VoIP providers now offer E911 capabilities in their systems. But there are still certain issues that businesses must address even in the context of a VoIP provider offering E911 services.
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One of these issues is when business users move from location to location with laptops or PDAs Latest News about PDAs. Business personnel can install VoIP software on their laptops and PDAs, then take those devices off the corporate network to make VoIP calls from remote locations. In this context the issue of emergency 911 calling poses an ever-growing enterprise concern with respect to how employee health emergencies are addressed.
"With VoIP, you can plug into any network and can continue to make calls," said Frost & Sullivan's manager of IP communications, Elka Popova. "But if you call 911 from remote locations, there's no automatic response."
One solution to this problem is to force users to enter their new physical location whenever they log in to their VoIP software so that an emergency service will be able to locate them when they need it. But this is not currently an automatic function built in to all VoIP software. It therefore will remain an issue.
Hosted Solutions
Another issue standing in the way of VoIP rollouts is the requirement for a dedicated I.T. staff to do the network configuration and monitoring. While large companies will have such a staff, smaller businesses without their own I.T. departments still can make a relatively painless transition to VoIP by going with a hosted service from a third-party provider.
"To me it makes good sense to go with a hosted solution so you can just call the service provider when problems arise and save significant cost that way," said Juniper Networks' Latest News about Juniper Networks senior manager of voice solutions, Scott Heinlein. But once a business gets large enough to have its own I.T. department, it will want to retain control over the VoIP infrastructure, Heinlein said.
"When you take a look at hosted services, you are taking the call system off the customer's premises and putting it into the data center," said Ted Chamberlin, Gartner's principal analyst for the communications group. "One issue is that when you outsource, then it is out of your control. If it needs to be close to you,outsourcing Latest News about Outsourcing it is not going to work."
Still, many network-administration functions are becoming fairly standardized and do not add much value to the business to do internally. "How much value does it add to maintain your own phones?" Chamberlin asked rhetorically. For those companies that do not want to make their I.T. departments learn the nuances of the VoIP world, it might not add up to a good return on investment to take on VoIP management in-house.
"What the hosted VoIP service does is allow you to reposition a lot of staff to writing critical applications and doing integration," said Chamberlin.
Chamberlin believes that if corporate planners have done their due diligence, there is not much downside to the hosted VoIP service. Still, Chamberlin cautions that hackers love data centers because of the considerable damage that they can inflict in a single break-in. "They are not nearly so active at the small company level," he said.
"When you have infrastructure that's critical, especially on applications that must comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPPA and other legislation, you have to make sure your data is secure," Chamberlin noted. "If your data is stored at adata center Latest News about data center, you'd like to think that it is meeting all the requirements, but putting another party between you and your data raises doubt. When it is stored on-premise, you have a much better idea of how secure it really is."
Garnering Attention
While all the issues spelled out here have hampered adoption of VoIP, the technology is getting a considerable amount of attention from companies of all sizes because it is perceived to be a major money-saver. And many industry experts say that, beyond cost reduction, enterprise managers should also appreciate the technology's other benefits.
"VoIP has the potential to do so much more than just deliver a dial tone throughout your data network," Snyder said. "It can tie applications together that used to be very difficult to interconnect."
To illustrate such capabilities, Snyder pointed out that VoIP systems can be tied to corporate databases so that business users can type in the name of a customer with whom they want to speak and automatically connect to that person while looking over that customer's purchase history and any other relevant data.
"Voice is not the only reason to undertake an IP technology leap," added Steve Perritt, Sprint Nextel's Latest News about Sprint Nextel director of IP Product Management. The issues involving legacy systems that I.T. managers previously had to handle -- even simple communications between sites -- were done in complex, difficult and expensive ways in the past, Perritt noted.
Ultimately, with VoIP services and offerings proliferating, enterprise customers looking to enhance the capabilities of their phone systems have plenty of good options to consider today. As the technology matures and major industry players push toward better standardization and interoperability, these options will only get better. | |
10-03-2005, 03:29 PM 
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