atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums VOIP Phones & IP PBX VoIP & Cloud Phones, Hosted PBX, General IP Phones What's all this VoIP stuff anyway?

I liken it to optical patch cords some audiophiles use to interconnect their component audio systems that cost $200.00

That is a pretty good analogy. Think also about $200 (or $2000) speaker wire or even $200 gold plated cryogenic treated power receptacles. It just goes to show the power of marketing and the gullibility of people. Make a convincing case and no matter how flawed it is people will hand over their money.

It's kinda like reading the Inquirer and thinking that because it's in print it must be true. There are virtually NO publications today that say anything about TDM yet every PC or IT publication is guaranteed to have something supporting VoIP nearly every month.

Even the friggin' cable company boasts that their "cable company telephone" service was rated #1 three years in a row by PC Magazine. A computer magazine rating telephone service?? No wonder all the geeks and IT "professionals" recommend it.

As telecom professionals our job is to provide a cost effective solution for our customers based on everything available, not what we read about in magazines or what is marketed to appeal to the IT industry.

-Hal

Manassas VA is a good example of a school system hellbent on deploying VOIP systemwide. Once they're convinced it's the way to go (thank the Architects and Enginnering companies) and endorse the system, it's only a matter of time (as history has shown in VA), before the other school systems follow. Sad but true...

service was rated #1 three years in a row by PC Magazine

Thats the funny fact, when you read one of these free IP telephony mags, Its seems like every single product have an award;

"best IP in class" "best new IP system" "best at show 2008" "best IPBX for single mothers"

Best system in range for making callers sound like Donald Duck on helium?

If PC Magazine readers say it's the best it just has to be!

Now, where are those aliens being kept?


-Hal

Once they're convinced it's the way to go (thank the Architects and Enginnering companies)

And they are certainly the ones to ask about telecom. Aren't they the ones who ALWAYS leave out the telephone closets and wiring in their designs?

-Hal

Well I'll start by saying that I am an IT guy with some phone experience. My company is in the process of moving to a new location and we are replacing the Rolm 9751 that I've worked on for several years now.

We decided on an IP-based system, ShoreTel to be specific. In the process we looked at both IP-only and Hybrid systems. We are a 15-site distribution company with around 300 employees.

This was a long process in which we issued an RFP, including a detailed breakdown of features/functionality that we require. Now we are early in the process, so the jury is definitely out on whether or not this will prove to be a good decision. I'll try my best to describe why we made the decision for this particular phone system, which is IP-only.

SETUP
We are going to have around 170 phone sets at our new location. Dial tone will be provided through dynamic T1 lines from the CLEC. We’ll also employ some POTS lines for backup. Eventually we’ll bring more sites onto the system using our backend WAN to route calls between locations. At present this is a private VPN, which does allow for QOS, though we may look at moving to MPLS. I’ve been told by more than one service tech at our provider that the WAN setup we have now is quite sufficient for voice traffic. At all current hub sites we still plan to have local phone lines delivered from the LEC or CLEC.

We have numerous outside sales people, so remote access is critical. Our sales reps require that calls follow them to cell phone, home office, or wherever they happen to be located. We probably won’t do soft phone immediately, though that is something we will investigate once the dust settles from our move.

Our new environment will be highly redundant from the network, phone system, and power standpoints. We’ll have multiple core switches, multiple paths to the core switches, redundant phone switching, full server room and distribution frame UPS, and a building generator. All equipment will be energized on different PDUs so that any power module failure won’t take down the entire system. This is my company’s hub site, so all this was going to happen regardless of which phone system we chose.

COST
The cost of the system was not the primary factor in our decision. It is certainly expensive to move to a VoIP system. The cost of the switching alone is huge. In our case we were going to replace the switching environment anyway, and will have a completely new cable infrastructure. That mitigated some of the additional costs for things like PoE switches and additional cable runs. I know that I’m not supposed to quote prices on this board, but perhaps I can say that the PoE switches we will employ are more than $5K each. This switching environment takes expertise to setup and our phone vendor has subcontracted that piece to a network integrator, which is another cost to consider.

This isn’t just plug in phones and go. The networking side of this installation requires knowledge by those who will maintain it. I plan to be there during the configuration of our switching environment so that I’ll have some understanding of the setup. There will certainly be some costs for support, but eventually in-house staff will have the knowledge to maintain the network completely. I have worked on routers and switches for quite some time, so this is not all completely new to me, though I’m not too familiar with VLANs and COS.

The cost of the phones is not insignificant either. I don’t have a really good basis of comparison, since I haven’t had the need to purchase new phones for quite some time. I am used to purchasing refurbished phones relatively inexpensively with our current system. Needless to say, the cost of new phones adds up quickly when you’re talking about purchasing as many as we’ll require.

Many systems have additional costs depending on the add-ons you select for the system. We found that ShoreTel provides most functionality with the base license. There are some things (like instant messaging) that require additional licenses or even additional servers. This is definitely something to keep in mind when purchasing an IP phone system.

FUNCTIONALITY
I think the biggest selling points to us were ease-of-use, flexibility, and integration that the phone system provides. Of course this is prior to implementation, so we’ll have to see if these things work out as well as we plan. Basically, here’s what we like on each count:

Ease-of-use
This system is so far superior to what we’ve been using and I think it will transform some aspects of our work. I’ll grant you that our technology is well out of date, so I’m not speaking from a place where I can compare to recent TDM or Hybrid technology, just relating what I like about the system we are buying. I will preface this by saying that major maintenance for our Rolm system is easy since the thing basically never goes down. I do have a support vendor to handle the major issues with our Rolm, but rarely have to see them.

The fact that our users can check the call manager software to see who’s on a call, how long they’ve been on it, or if they are in the office or out, will be very nice. I also like the fact that we can see received, missed, or place calls, as so many folks are used to on their cell phones. I think that in the call manager software that’s like a thousand records of call history. In addition, I like the fact that the feature buttons are straight-forward and employees can use the call manager to direct phone calls to whatever phone number they happen to be at. The call manager gives users a subset of their office phone functionality provided they are logged onto our system. Since we deliver applications through Citrix, our employees can access our systems (and call manager) from just about anywhere.

On the administrative end, I sure do like what I see. The user setup is a snap, taking less only a minute or two to setup an extension with voicemail. Obviously MAC work becomes a trivial matter at best. I think this will really be beneficial at our remote sites where we don’t maintain network folks on staff. Apparently all of the systems can be managed from one interface. The phone directory for the entire system is updated automatically once an extension is added to any site.

Flexibilty
The flexibility I’ll speak of here will mostly be realized when we start connecting additional offices and home users. We want our inside sales folks to be able to answer queue calls from any office, or even at home if necessary. We do have folks that travel between offices and it will be nice to have their phones follow them regardless of location. We also will have salespeople who only occasionally visit the office, so we don’t have to maintain dedicated workspace for those folks. They can come to the office, sit anywhere, and have their extension available when they log onto the phone. Again, since we deploy applications through Citrix, it really doesn’t matter which PC they use when in the office.

One area where the flexibility of this VoIP system will immediately be felt will be in our current office space. As I mentioned earlier, we are moving to a new office. While most folks will be moving, the company plans to leave 4-5 people in part of the building we are moving from. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to keep our current server room, where our Rolm phone switch is located. When I first heard that some folks would be staying behind, I was wondering how I was going to deliver phone service to them. Initially I thought of either moving the current Rolm system, or purchasing a smaller key system to accommodate these folks. The current building will remain on our network using the same WAN connection we currently use, though with a different subnet. With the ShoreTel system, I can simply buy some phones with power bricks and have them connect to the phone switch in our new location. No expensive new PoE switches, no key system, no moving our old system, no rewiring. And the best part is that since we are moving all of our phone numbers (DIDs) to the new site, these folks can retain their current numbers.

I also like the idea that users have the can manage their own settings, such as call forwarding, presence, and the like, and that the administrator has some flexibility in what options end-users can change. Of course the caveat with users having access to features on any system is that it could increase administrative work. The functionality seems pretty straightforward on the ShoreTel system, so I’m hoping that this won’t present too much of an issue. If it does, I can ratchet down security so it’s no longer an issue.

Integration
Of particular interest to our CIO (my boss) is the ability to integrate the phone system with our inside sales application. We are moving to a new ERP system where we anticipate functionality such as screen pops from our CRM application based on caller ID to our agents. Also, the system is capable of adding contacts to Outlook directly from the call manager software. We will deliver this functionality some time after the initial installation, but it certainly helps to know that it’s able to do this and the application programming interfaces are already written. Click to dial from Outlook is another feature of the software, though it remains to be seen how much benefit we’ll see from that. We haven’t yet moved to Outlook for our email, though that change is coming in a few months. With that may be a move to unified communications. This would allow for voicemails to be sent directly to email for retrieval. I’m not so sure of the value of this yet, but I do know that many of our folks carry blackberries and other smart phones, so there may be some benefit. The down side is that I imagine data storage requirements would go WAY up as well as backup times for our servers.

The addition of instant messaging is another benefit of this system. That’s an area that we will explore as time permits. There is another server required to accomplish this, and of course the cost of additional licensing. Since we run VMWare, I can setup a virtual server rather quickly, without the cost of additional hardware. The licensing is certainly a consideration, so we’ll have to do a cost/benefit analysis.

I realize that there’s probably a lot of functionality that can be achieved through Hybrid or even TDM systems available now. I will say that of the systems we looked at the Shoretel seemed to most naturally integrate into our data architecture. That’s not to say that other systems can’t do this, but from what we saw from that system, it seemed to be part of the architecture. As my boss put it after seeing the demo, “This is what I envisioned a VoIP system looking like.”

Again, I’ll reiterate that we are just beginning this process, so I’ll have to follow-up once we’ve gotten the system installed. Hopefully there won’t be too much pain on the way, though I certainly expect some.

Steve, that's a real nice story but it is not typical. The scope and size of your project as well the company itself, the resources and funds available to pull this off put you with less than 10% of all companies and businesses in this country. What may work for you may not even be appropriate for most others and this points out another big fallacy of VoIP. Other companies and IT "professionals" read stories like this and automatically assume this is what they should be doing also.

As my boss put it after seeing the demo, “This is what I envisioned a VoIP system looking like.”

That's pretty funny and at the same time illustrates what the hype and marketing can do to manipulate peoples minds. They envision a pretty picture of what a VoIP system should be rather than the reality of what it actually is.

-Hal

Steve, I'm fully aware of the extensive research that your company did in making your selection. We agree that your situation is very unique and warranted a thorough shopping experience. It is also important to note that you didn't rule out TDM equipment at the onset; that you did give it an equal shot in the decision-making process.

I think the general frustration we have here regarding VOIP systems is not from people like you. You went about this entire process the correct way. You went in knowing what you are doing, what your company's expectations are and most importantly, you made the potential vendors do the full product demonstration. You are spending the small, well medium fortune for the proper POE switches. You are doing this thing correctly from the get-go. That is very unusual to say the least.

Our frustration comes from people being sold VOIP in any or all instances. Little insurance offices, restaurants, you know what I mean. Those instances are where the true snake oil salesmen come out of the woodwork.

Steve, you are one of the good IT guys here.

Well... yeah, they're the ones...

Yet another fact of life we have to live with...