Out of the Box IT
Osama M. Faris brings out of the box thinking about information technology into focus.
Archive for the ‘Voice over IP and UC’ Category
FAR launches new hip hop video for April 1
Monday, April 5th, 2010By the time you read read this quick break from my more serious articles, I’ll be in Egypt on business. But I hope you all had a chance to check out FAR’s April Fool’s Day video and press release last week highlighting FAR’s decision to diversify it’s IT services portfolio by introducing rap music recording and production. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth watching for my cameo scene alone!
Be sure to read the press release and check out the Studi-O website for more details!
Going to VoIP: But what about service, continuity and upgrades?
Monday, February 22nd, 2010This is my fourth and last article in a series on VoIP and unified communications. Having talked about the key terms, how to put together a basic evaluation checklist, the offerings, price and value, in previous articles, I’m going to talk a bit about what else is important — those considerations that are difficult to quantify and calculate, but that should still play a role in every purchase decision.
In my pervious articles, I talked about FAR’s decision to host our own espresso machine. When we decided to buy our own espresso machine to save money, we didn’t look at the cost of getting our beans wholesale and buying a coffee roaster. Not just because it wouldn’t go with the office decor. It also wouldn’t have made business sense.
A business should decide what is really integral to your business and what is not, and buy the tools that are integral to success, but consider renting the nice-to-haves. For most small and medium organizations, it makes sound financial sense typically to buy an on-premise phone system; if they have concerns about maintaining it, they can outsource the support and monitoring to a business like FAR. Just putting the suggestion out there!
Think about the service.
Where the espresso metaphor becomes a little problematic is in the question of service. I tried having Vince (my CMO) make espresso for me, but it just wasn’t the same as seeing a smiling, happy barista. On the other hand, if I want an espresso at 2:30am, I just phone him and get it delivered. He knows who signs his cheques (no, seriously, I would never phone Vince past 11pm for something that small).
But imagine a coffee shop where the line-up may be really, really long one day, and short another. The barista may be very nice and knowledgeable or very apathetic depending on the day. Having your own machine in the office means you can make your espresso when you want, and if you make it yourself, you know the service is going to be spectacular. Now, multiply the important of good coffee by the urgency of the most business-critical system you have, your phones.
The problem with making a business decision based purely on service is that it’s often difficult to determine what level of service you’ll be able to expect consistently from a provider until after you’re signed up. If you’ve ever signed a long-term service contract, you know that the quality of service doesn’t always hold up over time and that you rarely find out until it’s too late. Business should be careful to research their service providers to ensure that they are not just committed to good service but transparency in their business dealings.
With an on-premise solution, you have much greater control over service. You have the choice of hiring internal resources to manage your system. Or you have the choice to hiring an IT managed services firm like FAR.. Or you can rely on the vendor’s professional services and support organizations. Or you can do all three to solve specific problems. It’s entirely up to you, and you can make the decisions you think best for your business. With hosted VoIP, you’re one customer among potentially hundreds vying for the same resources when the system goes down, and your ability to draw in additional resources if often extremely limited.
Don’t believe everything you hear about disaster recovery
Many hosting providers tout disaster recovery as a key feature of their VoIP offer. At FAR, we take security, continuity, failover, redundancy, robustness and recovery very, very seriously. When it comes to disaster recovery, we advise our customers that what’s important is to have a comprehensive plan that protects their corporate data, their network infrastructure and their most valuable resources: their people. Disaster recovery is critical.
But it’s worth noting that any good on-premise VoIP system should provide redundancy and disaster recovery. Adtran’s NetVanta’s solution does and at a fairly reasonable cost. Also, keep in mind that the disasters that can happen to your business can also happen to your hosting provider’s business and the lines and cables in between your business and their business. Hopefully they have a lengthy disaster recovery plan of their own. If you do decide to use a hosted service provider, be sure to ask about this.
If up-front capital expenses are a problem, think about leasing an on-premise system
Even though the business case for an on-premise system is strong, many small and medium businesses want to get their feet wet with VoIP first before they make a long-term buying decision. This is understandable, but businesses should know that leasing an on-premise system is also an option, depending on the reseller. Leasing is a lot like renting, and there are economic advantages and disadvantages, but it can sometimes help your business to better structure costs.
Prices are also decreasing generally. The old, fairly expensive PBX systems of just 10 years ago are coming down rapidly in terms of their pricing, and typically, PBX replacements like Adtran’s NetVanta are even less expensive. There are free, open-source solutions. However, these often require a fair amount ofprofessional services and support to make them operational. The nice thing about a solution like NetVanta is that it’s inexpensive, very quick to install and deploy, and there’s a lot of end-user productivity functionality out of the box. In any case, businesses don’t have to buy Cisco or Avaya just to get a reliable PBX or PBX replacement anymore.
Remember, the features these days are more in the software, less in the hardware
In theory, a hosting solution provides a clear and compelling argument in terms of delivering new features when compared with a traditional hardware PBX, but in practice, this isn’t as good as it sounds. A hosting provider can deliver new features at any time – if the hosting provider deems it appropriate, if it fits with their business model and if they hardware and software decisions they’ve made allow for it. There are no guarantees, and the features available today and down the road may vary substantially based on the technology your VoIP solution provider puts in place.
With Adtran’s NetVanta UC Server on other, similar, software-focused solutions, to get a powerful new phone system with the latest features, we just upgrade the software. It’s very cost-effective and simple. Yes, we’re dependent on the vendor to add new features, but NetVanta’s software also provides a service creation environment. We can build our own phone-based applications whenever we want. The system is mostly drag and drop and it easily hooks into corporate databases.
So, should you host or not host?
What FAR recommend to clients is that they come in for a demo of Adtran’s NetVanta UC Server before they make a decision. If they like it, then they get a very powerful, very cost-effective phone system that really opens the door to individual and organizational productivity that empowers every employee in the business. If they don’t, then worst case, they get a free espresso and are able to make a clear and informed business decision based on the available options.
And if they come in to talk about VoIP, I also talk to them about their network, their security, their Website, their email and, most important, how information technology relates to their business process and how FAR can help them with all of those things. A phone system is just one business tool in the information technology arsenal these days.
In my next couple of articles, I’ll be talk about some of these technologies and whether putting them in The Cloud makes sense. Be sure to check back!
Getting ready to VoIP: Building your evaluation checklist
Friday, January 29th, 2010As this series of articles explains, many small and medium businesses are grappling with the choice of whether to adopt VoIP, and if they do, whether to go with a hosted or an on-premise solution. This article addresses how small and medium organizations can ready themselves to start evaluating solutions. The benefits to VoIP and unified communications are substantial (not sure what Voice over Internet Protocol or unified communications is? Read my previous article!).
What benefits should you expect? Lower costs, great productivity
The good news is that VoIP and unified communications can lower costs and help your employees respond to customers more quickly and more professionally. On the other hand, it can also increase network and business process complexity. If inexpensive long-distance isn’t critical to your business, VoIP many not be the best choice. If you do most of your business on the Web instead of by phone or fax, unified communications may not be worth the expense.
On the other hand, many new PBX replacements are much less expensive (even with all of the added features and benefits) than their traditional PBX competitors; many are much less expensive to install; and you never know when your business requirements might change substantially. The more flexible, less expensive, better-featured solution with more benefits is rarely a bad business decision.
The benefits are worth the costs for FAR. With VoIP, when I call a customer in Texas or in Australia (for example), I save on the long distance charges. FAR doesn’t even use a traditional phone company. We use an Internet Telephony Service Provider (ITSP). The company who provides me the service is BabyTel, and I can tell you, the calls are as reliable and the quality is just as good as a regular phone line I don’t even have to worry about the cost and apathy of dealing with a regular phone company.
In addition to the cost savings of VoIP, with NetVanta’s Unified Communications Server (the VoIP and UC solution FAR uses), FAR benefits from a wide range of productivity features with call control, unified messaging, simple administration, and more.
Building your checklist—identifying whether VoIP or UC can benefit your organization
When businesses consider an information technology purchase, they should always consider the nature of the specific challenges they are trying to meet. What’s most important is to figure out which features are most important to your business and which features are nice to have, and how much you want to spend up-front and overtime, as well as what you expect to pay in terms of ownership and finally, what kind of return on investment you hope to see. The last is very important, and it’s often the most difficult to calculate. Some other common questions follow, but this is by no means exhaustive:
First, are your customers widely distributed geographically? One of the best reasons to invest in a VoIP solution is to cut long distance call costs. If your business conducts a lot of its business by phone and has customers in Paris, France and Paris Texas, VoIP might be a good fit.
Second, do you have a lot of fax machines? If you do, your business can always replace your fax machines with a fax server product, but many VoIP solutions include fax. A fax server can help make your fax environment more secure where privacy is an issue. With customers who just want a fax server, FAR recommends they consider NetVanta just for his capability alone. It’s considerably less expensive than many off the shelf fax server alternatives and often more secure than stand-alone fax machines.
Third, do you have a lot of branch offices, teleworkers or a mobile sales force? This is increasingly true for most small and medium organizations. More people are working from home or remotely. Many industries are simply given to having a lot of branch offices (e.g., insurance and real estate, among others). Unified communications features (e.g., being about to route your calls to any phone with find me/follow me) and unified messaging (e.g. getting your office voicemail as an email attachment on your Blackberry at a customer site) and wonderful for today’s nimble small and medium organizations.
Unified messaging is not necessarily a part of all unified communications offerings, but I would never recommend that a client buy a unified communications solution that didn’t have UM. I can also have my calls ring my cell-phone, my home, to a hotel phone (or all four) with call control. Anyone who calls me at my desk can be routed to my cell. It’s not a bunch of arcane numbers and symbols I have to punch into my phone. Everything’s right in front of me on my desktop in Windows-based software.
Fourth, do you want to streamline customer service by providing information and account services to customers by phone self-service? In the old days, it was called Interactive Voice Response (IVR), and it still is in some cases. Today, it’s increasingly called CEBP (communications-enabled business process), but these phrases are painfully polysyllabic ways to describe the organizational productivity behind: “Press 1 one now to check the status of your package”-style phone applications.
A good unified communications solution should help any business streamline customer service with self-service phone applications. Whether it’s checking the status of their package or order, transferring funds, registering for college classes, reporting their kids absent and more, phone-based self-service is increasingly popular. It helps organizations work more intelligently and collaboratively. NetVanta UC Server has a great point and click service environment that allows organizations or their service providers to build these kinds of applications quickly and cost-effectively.
Fifth, how critical is it to your IT team to be able to manage VoIP? FAR uses NetVanta because it provides a simple, Windows-based environment for us to do administration remotely for our clients (I really like NetVanta, but yes, there are lots of other solutions on the market).
It’s all managed through simple, Windows-based software. It integrates simply and effectively with Microsoft Exchange and our Blackberries. If I need to add a new employee, one of my managers just opens Active Directory and adds them as a user to the system and then plugs their phone into the network. The software auto-configures phones from snom, Polycom, Grandstream and a lot of other vendors.
Sometimes, very obscure features offer a lot of value. For example, I had no idea what a “hunt group” was before FAR installed NetVanta UC Server (it was Objectworld UC Server back then). A “hunt group” means that a call rings one extension, and then another extension, and then another until someone picks up. It’s a good way to ensure that calls are routed to the most appropriate person first, but then escalated appropriately if that person can’t take a call. Today, that feature is very important to FAR’s business process and our customer response.
Once you have a clear idea of your expectations and a checklist, you’re reading to start evaluating specific hosted vs. on-premise solutions.
Once they have a clear idea of what communications challenges they’re hoping to meet, businesses should do is to determine how they want to communicate with their customers in order to compete effectively, decide what their costs tolerances are, and then start looking for specific solutions that meet those needs. If this sounds too complicated already, don’t worry. IT managed services firms work with small and medium organizations to help them conduct these kinds of evaluations and make the best choices for their businesses.
If there’s one thing that’s true about comparing VoIP and unified communications offerings, it’s that comparisons are rarely apples to apples and the feature descriptions are rarely intuitive. Unless you can really trust your vendor, be prepared to ask a lot of questions. Ask a lot of questions anyhow – if you trust your vendor, I’m sure s/he’ll be happy to answer any questions you have. Next week, I’m going to start talking about price, cost and value in hosted vs. on-premise solutions. Be sure to check back!