Bjarne Munch, senior research analyst at META Group in Asia Pacific, said that a few years back enterprises typically had the perception of IP telephony as a free service where they could migrate voice on to their data network without any large investments.
"The reality is that if you want to have more traffic on your data network you have to ensure that your data network has that capacity," Munch said.
He added that companies couldn't expect to migrate their voice services onto their data network without having to make some changes to it.
Another mistake Munch has seen enterprise make is not having gathered enough information about their current telephony spend, and information about the cost of maintaining the infrastructure.
Munch said this meant that they didn't know what they were comparing IP telephony with, because they didn't have statistics on their current environment. "They've been migrating based on the assumption that it's cheaper," Munch warned.
Munch believes businesses that could benefit from IP telephony are those with a certain size, and branches that are sufficiently geographically dispersed. Companies which already have a data network in place connecting these branch offices can then interconnect its PABX over a LAN network, using an IP telephony solution, Munch said.
"Enterprises that have low usage of telephony would have trouble justifying the initial capital investment on IP telephony--it costs money to buy and install the IP telephony equipment," he said.
This will be a bit of a commercial but it could be of value.
Alltech Communications are predictive network management engineers and modelers. We are seeing Government and the Enterprise increasingly look to VoIP as a positive move forward. A constraint is to know whether the network that exists can handle the new technology and the anticipated loads?
This is where Alltech comes in.
1) We can sell you the software that will help you model VoIP to predict performance, to design the required service and pre-determine SLA's.
2) We can bring the software on-site and consult (with you) to provide the same view of the network.
I shall send a following e-mail that includes a one page description of "what we do".
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