Voip brokering service

BOSTON - Corporate IT professionals from small companies to the largest Fortune 500 firms convened last week at the Enterprise Networks 2004 conference in Boston to swap stories and advice on how to make VoIP work and the reasons for converging voice and data networks.

The consensus among VoIP early adopters at the conference is that there are real cost savings in deploying IP PBXs, IP phones, softphones and using IP to carry voice traffic.

John Manville, senior vice president of network services at Lehman Brothers, says his firm began deploying IP telephony pilots with Cisco gear in 2000.By 200!,the firm had more than 1,000 phones installed. The technology worked well,Manville says, with some minor hiccups and a few shortcomings in terms of call features.

The network was put to the test on Sept. 11, 2001, when Lehman s offices in the World Trade Center were destroyed. IP telephony helped get Lehman back online because a disaster-recovery site was established in New Jersey with back-up Cisco CallManager servers.

"There is no way we could have recovered as quickly as we did" without IP telephony Manville says. Lehman workers were moved to Sheraton hotels in Manhattan and given Cisco IP phones, which linked back to the back-up data center. Most of the firm's employees were up and working from hotels within a few days.

Manville says the flexibility and productivity gains of IP telephony - such as converged applications and unified messaging - will be the drivers for the technology If he were starting a new network today Manville says,"Putting in a TDM-based system would be a questionable choice."

Another advocate of IP telephony is Chris Mullins, ClO of Master Financial, a Long Beach, Calif., mortgage brokering firm with offices in Jacksonville, FIa., and Denver.

The first thing that might strike someone walking into a Master Financial call center is the lack of telephones, Mullins says.That's because all 350 employees use softphones from Sphere Communications.

"When we looked at the cost of phones, it seemed like a no-brainer," says Mullins, who estimates that he saved about $250 per employee by not installing hard phones.The move to an all-softphone network happened when the company moved from offices in Indianapolis to California.

Instead of replacing the company's Avaya key systems in the main office, Mullins put in Sphere's Spherecall IP PBX in the main office and installed softphones on all employees' desktops. all softphones in the main office and branches run off the centralized Spherecall server over a VPN. Mullins says this has saved the firm more than $135,000 per year on phone changes and equipment.

The use of VoIP as a tool for reducing international long-distance charges was outlined by John Parsons, manager of Global Telecommunications Worldwide Information Systems at Eastman Kodak. Over the past five years, Kodak has seen its WAN data transport increase nine-fold. Meanwhile, it has cut its international telecorn costs five-fold. This was done by linking more than 50 Nortel PBXs in Kodaks largest offices in the U.S., Europe, Latin America and Asia over a Multi-protocol Label Switch (MPLS)-based VPN service, which also carries all the company's data traffic.

Kodak chose Singapore Telecom and AT&T as its MPLSVPN carrier. To connect the Nortel PBXs to the IP network, the devices were connected to Cisco routers via ISDN links, which let calls flow over the MPLS-based IP network.

Parsons says one of the biggest keys in keeping the VoIP network running smoothly has more to do with carrier negotiations and less with technology

"MPLS VPN services are competitive, but you have to challenge service providers on price," Parsons says. "You have to beat on your service providers and make them give you the service-level agreements that you're comfortable with. The service-level agreements they offer as standard are not going to be enough."