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June 2, 2006
• Vol.28 Issue 22
Page(s) 1 in print issue
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Is VoIP Simplifying Life For SMEs?
A Look Beyond The Hype Of The New Wave Of Telephony
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 Touted heavily by vendors as the smart choice for companies looking to implement new or replacement phone equipment, VoIP appears poised to carve major inroads into the enterprise communication landscape. But seeing through the mountains of hype surrounding VoIP can be as difficult as making a long-distance call using two soup cans and a string.
Enterprises have heard similar hype before, but legendary flops such as ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) and Token Ring have most companies now lending a leery eye toward technologies promising to deliver huge rewards through increased productivity and big savings.
VoIP, which harnesses the power of IP networks to support voice traffic, carries similar promises, including freedom from high long-distance charges, robust call routing abilities, and impressive call center flexibility. But is the technology following through to make good on those promises?
 Reaping Research Benefits
When the J. David Gladstone Institutes, a group of medical research institutes affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco, moved from San Francisco General Hospital to a $74 million dedicated research facility at the end of 2004, Gladstone IT Officer Reginald Drakeford felt it was the right time for VoIP.
“Close to that time, I saw that [VoIP] was really developing and it had reached a mature focal point where I could take the initiative to put a voice over IP system here at Gladstone,” Drakeford says. “I have no regrets whatsoever now that we’ve put the system in place.”
Drakeford’s decision wasn’t based on a mere hunch. VoIP vendors set up mini-PBX systems that Drakeford, his staff, and anyone else who would be involved with new phone systems could thoroughly test. As they went through the process of trying to break the systems and finding problems, Drakeford was able to identify the system that showed the most resilience. But testing the technical abilities of the VoIP systems wasn’t the only piece of the puzzle that narrowed the vendor field.
“The second part is the vendor’s track record as far as customer service,” Drakeford explains. “You could have the Rolls Royce of anything, but if the customer support is not there, it’s worth crap. No matter how good a device is, it breaks.”
Gladstone followed up on plenty of references and paid close attention to how vendors handled them as potential clients. The organization also looked at whether the phone systems had the features it needed; in fact, one of the primary reasons Gladstone chose Mitel to provide its VoIP service was because the vendor’s equipment could emulate about 90% of the same functionality of its previous phone system.
Happy Returns
Mindbridge Software, of Norristown, Pa., also implemented VoIP a year and a half ago, hoping to take advantage of the savings and functionality inherent in a network-based phone system. Moving to VoIP was a particularly bold move for Mindbridge, considering the company experimented with the technology more than four years ago and failed.
“Even in the perfect world, things don’t go as smoothly as you like,” says Scott Testa, chief operating officer at Mindbridge. “But sometimes it takes a few years to get the creaks out, and I think this was certainly that type of situation.”
This time around, Mindbridge contacted vendor references and asked them if their VoIP vendor would be able to deliver the services required by Mindbridge. Testa and his staff eventually chose Cisco, which followed through with an implementation that Testa termed as “close to being as painless as possible.” Now his company is able to perform tasks never before possible with its traditional phone system.
“By the nature of our VoIP system, we’re able to easily forward phone calls from the VoIP system to a cell phone or to a BlackBerry and access voicemails from different ways, either by calling in or by accessing them via sound files in our EMAP system,” Testa says. “It allows us to easily add and take people off the system.”
Although moving to VoIP is seamless in many aspects, it does entail a bit of a learning curve—Mindbridge had to train everyone from the administrators all the way down to the end users. But now that the system is well entrenched, the staff has no problems using the technology, even when working from remote locations.
Vendor Minefield
Like Mindbridge, Indianapolis-based Proxito’s first venture into VoIP late last year wasn’t positive. In fact, the first vendor the company chose failed altogether to deliver a seamless solution.
“Our initial provider didn’t work out the way we wanted it to,” says Brian Luerssen, president of Proxito. “I think the Voice over IP industry is so new that there are companies that come and go. It would have been better if we had tested for a longer period of time, but we had gotten some good reviews [for the vendor] from colleagues. The only way to do research is look at the company’s Web site and search around on Google for bad things, but at the time [the vendor] didn’t have any bad things. Everyone else was reporting that it was okay, but then it just sort of fell apart.”
According to Luerssen, whose company switched to another VoIP vendor, it takes only a small glitch to throw a wrench into the entire VoIP machine. For example, if you have an Internet line that’s not working correctly or a provider that’s not following through on promised service, you can easily experience dropped calls, jittery calls, and other problems.
Planning Is Key
The most prominent lesson companies learn hopping aboard the VoIP train is that without sufficient capacity, the project could be doomed from the outset because lack of dedicated bandwidth can easily cause signal quality issues and other problems that aren’t always easily mended. To fend off such difficulties, Drakeford employed a system capable of handling 1,000 users, even though the highest number of users on the system at any given point can reach only about 600.
The successful implementation of VoIP relies heavily on the vendor’s ability to follow through on promised technology and services, but it’s tough to deny that prior legwork puts companies moving to VoIP far ahead in the game.
Drakeford, for one, did his homework: “To me, the essence of implementation is planning. And we planned our butts off.” 
by Christian Perry
Faxing Over VoIP? Forget It
Packet loss over networks isn’t a big deal, even when transmitting voice data. But fax data is an entirely different matter, as attempts to send faxes over VoIP networks often end in miserable messes of gobbled characters. In fact, fax quality is so substandard using VoIP that companies switching to VoIP need to fall back on traditional phone lines for faxing duties.
Says Proxito’s Brian Luerssen: “Faxing is kind of tricky, so we actually added one analog phone line back in. Faxing over Voice over IP is available, but, for lack of a better phrase, it’s kind of a joke.”
Says Mindbridge Software’s Scott Testa: “For faxing, we’ve got a system where the faxes can be routed directly to the desktop via email. But actually, at the end of the day we did have some standard lines installed that aren’t run through the PBX for fax lines.”
Says Gladstone’s Reginald Drakeford: “We still do faxing on analog. That’s about the only analog we use here. If for some reason the Voice over IP, which is part of the network, was to crash hard, we would still have our analog lines and we could use those fax lines as lines of communication.” |
View the chart that accompanies this article.
(NOTE: These pages are PDF (Portable Document Format) files. You will need Adobe Acrobat to view these pages. Download Adobe Acrobat Reader)
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