Having just gone through the effort of an IPT deployment, many companies reject the idea of introducing an additional management system in the drive to make the project a success.
However, a company that wishes to optimize its existing IP telephony infrastructure to create a future-proof next generation network, must overcome three daunting challenges:
The cost of delivering new services - It is imperative that new services are delivered effectively without major systems integration efforts and that budgets remain under control. Services need to be delivered to users seamlessly and they must be easy for users to adopt from day one. The adoption of new services and their effectiveness in actually improving productivity needs to be measurable, so that constant improvement is possible.
Business diversity - As networks become more complex, the business must be able to seamlessly manage best in class, multi-vendor UC services,, across both new technology and alongside legacy environments. Solving the problems of system upgrades and managing multiple voice and data infrastructure elements is also important, with the aim of performing MACs (moves, adds, changes) as simply as possible. The business must also overcome the hurdle of geographically diverse operations and be able to personalize services for specific business units or for individual staff.
Future-proofing the network - To compete effectively, the organization must be able to cost-effectively support all of today’s demands on the network, as well as rapidly and effectively roll out any future services – both Cisco and other UC services, such as unified messaging, desktop integration (Presence), and collaboration services. The challenge therefore is to ensure that added network complexity does not cause a drain on resources and the highly skilled technical team is focused on business development, rather than being overwhelmed by administrative tasks. The network must also be scalable, to support future growth, migrate new acquisitions and integrate UC into enterprise applications.