Considerations and strategy for the road to Convergence

The safest and most diligent approach to convergence and VoIP adoption must be through a well planned and progressive migration.Through the planning process there are some key considerations:

Converging communication expenditure - ROI and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Consider a total review of the 'Infrastructure Estate'.A full investment review should be undertaken.How best to leverage existing investments, and make new.Key review points should include:

• Is change necessary? - If a traditional PBX infrastructure is currently employed to great effect, then there is a case for no immediate change in the physical equipment.That said, a slow migration should be considered
• Is their a Migration route? - Many organisations are successfully IP enabling their existing infrastructure, thereby reducing the immediate investment requirements and also minimising the organisational impact, whilst still benefiting from convergence immediately
• Who should support? - Many companies have a variety of providers for each element.The options are to keep this so, or consider augmenting these to be supplied by one service provider who can provide and support under one service contract

Converging networks – is one better than many?

Advances in networking technology means that there is no longer a requirement to run separate network architectures for large sites and small remote sites or remote working.This is something that has limiting corporate wide applications being deployed right across organisations in the past and held back the benefits of collaboration.One converged network can deliver:

• The ability to simply and universally provision a range of applications and services to all employees
• Give greater flexibility for disaster recovery solutions – robust and flexible contingency plans and options
• Simpler and more cost effective administration and support – from simple adds moves and changes through to total network administration
• The ability to gain synergies across voice & data based applications at the same time converging their capabilities and business benefits
• The ability to take advantage of the high end capabilities of vendors/manufacturers equipment (e.g CRM applications and Unified Communications), that may have been difficult to deploy across separate networks