Large enterprises recognize that in today’s competitive marketplace, a state of the art communications infrastructure is critical to successful business operations and growth. For organizations across the globe, this catapults next generation communications to the top of the agenda.

Large, complex enterprises such as banks and government departments are multi-site, require multi-cluster architecture and are typically not homogeneous organisations. They are in fact often made up of a number of semi-autonomous companies or divisions, which represent a virtual multi-tenant environment.

In other words, then are very similar to a large service provider, wanting an integrated, centrally managed IP communications platform, which can be administered in a devolved hierarchy, with each virtual tenant only controlling their own services and users. They are also very focused on the need for an easy transition between their existing TDM voice platform and the new IP platform, where existing phone number logic and allocations are maintained.

Delivering new UC applications across large organizations brings different challenges to those faced by small and medium-sized businesses. Large enterprises typically have more distributed architectures with heterogeneous networks in place, and often a more complex, even multi-country, dial plan (the expected number and pattern of digits for a telephone number, which must comply with the networks to which they connect).

The challenges facing large enterprises IT&T departments include:

  • Large distributed,multi-cluster architectures with complex inter-cluster trunking and gateway requirements, all of which contributes to a high operating cost and difficult to maintain environment
  • Managing acquisitions, migrations and historically independent departmental integrations, onto a common, cost effective platform
  • Enterprises often lack the quality and/or quantity of staff to support the growth of an advanced IP telecoms network.

The addition of UC adds to the challenge:

  • Large enterprises typically need to support a complex network architecture. A mixture of IP-PBX vendors, versions and models within each vendor, plus a legacy non-IP TDM architecture must be managed
  • Complex UC applications have to be integrated into the enterprise network, and made network aware; it is not simply a case of adding an new application server
  • The architecture needs to support multiple UC vendors, as no one vendor can provide best-in-class for all enterprise UC requirements
  • Integrating UC and enterprise applications, to provide communications enablement within these applications, becomes an important driver for productivity gains

These large complex organizations often have special requirements and can only obtain the expected benefits from IP communications if they have a comprehensive service delivery and management tool such as VOSS.