Opinion: The new rules of enterprise IP telephony

Brendan Maree country manager A/NZ for Interactive Intelligence talks to CRN about IP telephony and its key advantages to business.

Say Goodbye to your PBX and hello to networked applications and open standards adaptability

'With the emergence of IP telephony and the move from traditional communications hardware boxes to networked software applications and open communications standards such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for VoIP, it's clear that PBX systems have run their course.
 
The downfall of the PBX has been on analysts' projection boards for some time.

Back in February 2003, for instance, Gartner's "Next-Generation: Enterprise IP Telephony" report stated rather inauspiciously that by year-end 2007 "traditional enterprise telephony system manufacturers will have ceased development of TDM-based PBX systems, and will have announced their intention to discontinue support within five years."

To many business owners and IT decision-makers, life without their trustworthy PBX phone system is a scary proposition - as is the thought of migrating to new technologies.  

Yet at the same time, the IP-based convergence of voice and data on a single network has opened a whole new world of communications.

It is increasingly making businesses and their employees more effective at collaborating, serving customers and generating revenues than any previous generation of technology.
 
The rules of business communications have changed, primarily in that IP telephony and its open standards approach make the enterprise more readily adaptable.

This means that your enterprise can either continue to conduct business as usual with a PBX that's soon to be extinct, or it can play by the New Rules of IP Telephony and set ground-breaking trends for how your business, employees and customers interact.
 
Following are four such New Rules to think about if you haven't already made the move to IP communications.
 
Old Rule: Dial-tone is all you need.
New Rule: The value is in the applications.

Some businesses need little more than a telephone to open the pipeline to customers.

But now that e-mail, Web chat and instant messaging have joined the list of multimedia options consumers insist on, it's safe to categorise such businesses as the minority.

Which is where the New Rule comes in for value-adding applications.

Rather than adding one hardware box after another for a PBX, ACD, automated attendant, Web server, chat server, IVR system and on and on, pre-integrated application bundles allow an enterprise to replace costly, inflexible multi-box equipment that doesn't always cooperate across media channels.
 
Moreover with data running closer than ever alongside voice interactions, the new breed of "information worker" who interacts with customers (as well as partners and suppliers) must be able to access product information, pricing, customer or inventory data while on the phone or in a Web chat.
 
On the voice side, several new IP PBX phone and communications systems offer pre-integrated client applications to manage queued calls and Web chats from the desktop, including client options for selected Microsoft Dynamics applications and Outlook.

Choose an IP PBX system developed on an open-standards software architecture, and integrating the business applications your employees use most becomes fairly seamless.