TechNO Expo

Unified communications is the next evolution of IP telephony. When we say unified communications, we’re talking about presence-based applications, mobility, unified messaging, instant messaging, soft phone, and video. Companies moving to unified communications are looking to support collaboration, improve communication, and increase productivity of their workforce

Session initiation protocol (SIP) is becoming the new application layer control signaling standard because it can connect unique devices through one protocol.

Gina Odean
National convergence director, North American Communications Resource, Inc., Eagan

My team of engineers is dedicated to selling and supporting VOIP deployments, so we often feel like everyone is moving down this path! The technology’s quantifiable dollar savings have motivated businesses to overcome their concerns about leading edge technology and dive in. This tends to be a behind-the-scenes VOIP deployment, visible only to the IT department.

The much more visible manifestation of VOIP—IP telephones—has been a little slower to catch on. In the beginning, businesses saw little value for that expense and often felt their LAN was not ready to support phones. And now, although we can show several cool applications that only an IP-based telephone can support, their benefit tends to be in the area of productivity, not savings, and that is a tougher sell in tight economic times.

I’ve worked in the area of VOIP for almost seven years and have watched the term “VOIP” crawl from niche-based geek-speak into our daily language. That signifies a general acceptance of this technology in the marketplace. (It also means I can now tell my Mom and Dad what I do for a living.) However, accepted does necessarily translate to widely-deployed because there are still many opportunities for improvement in the technology.

When NACR started implementing VOIP for customers, we found that this new architectural approach opened up communications capabilities that TDM technology could not support. However, the deployments were truly painful. VOIP introduced many more opportunities for problems, the implementations were considerably harder, and the necessary network fine-tuning required a combination of skills in both voice communications and data networking.

Over the last few years, we have seen more products and protocols that move us in the direction of plug and play. The remaining technology challenges require help from experienced experts.