IP telephony plays a critical role in next generation corporate communications as a cost effective way to achieve voice and data integration. The wide acceptance of IP telephony has been largely due to its ability to rationalize separate voice and data networks, whilst reducing the heavy resource and maintenance overheads associated with traditional PABX infrastructures.
However many large companies have deployed IP telephony across parts of their organization, but are yet to realize the economic benefits that were promised:
- Network and PSTN savings are less than expected
- Telephony staff costs have not decreased as planned
- Highly skilled staff are still caught up in administrative tasks
- IP telephony adds new complexities, requiring new expertize.
Unified communications (UC) promises to finally deliver the original business plan benefits through improvements to staff and enterprise productivity. Yet organizations are struggling to understand how these new UC services can be launched effectively onto their existing platform to deliver full productivity gains, at minimum cost and without impact to day-to-day business.