Enterprises winging in it with VoIP deployments

Stuart Corner
Monday, 30 July 2007 07:17

Business IT - Technology

"We have had the [IP telephony] solution in for...almost two years now and we're probably at a point where we can start to tune some of that network a little bit better, but we significantly over-provisioned just to make sure hat we ended up in the right place."

However he said that this had meant that the move to VoIP had not produced significant cost savings. "Looking at cost savings, on the network side we probably didn't achieve any dramatic cost savings in the first tranche, we will over time, but we took a cautious approach to begin with."

Another member of the panel Robbie Kruger, CTO of Avaya Asia Pacific, cautioned against simply over provisioning, describing it as  "a short-term view," and saying that companies needed continuous proactive management of their networks to ensure that voice and other applications performed adequately at all times.

"I'd start working on a proactive management project straight away because you could come in tomorrow and  find people using applications that are very high band-width intensive and it can actually clog your network up quite quickly."

Barkley added that, without this knowledge, enterprises could not be sure what applications were running on their network. "Can anybody [in the audience] guarantee that there aren't people in their office running Skype?" One hand was raised, leading Kruger to comment: "Consumer grade applications like Skype, they're great. They provide free voice, fantastic, but for an enterprise what it can actually do is it can actually be, one, a security threat to your organisation because what you actually do is you set up yourself as a mini hub for other Skype users to actually use you as a means to get to other people. So if you use Skype within your office, you will actually find you're compromising your business. our voice might not be there tomorrow."