why VoIP?
A Sytel Survey
At the recent Communications in Business event laid on by the UK CMA, we laid a question before the participants:
"Why VoIP? What are the 3 main advantages of deploying VoIP to manage call flows in an enterprise environment?"
The answers* we received give an interesting flavour of where ‘Enterprise UK’ is in its love affair with this (relatively) new technology.
The top 5 most popular answers we received are as follows. How does this stack up against your expectations?
- Network convergence
i.e. we no longer have need of both telephony and data networks; both voice and data can travel together.
- Ease of support
i.e. because of network convergence, the whole shebang will be easier to manage, update, fix, move and change.
- ID portability
i.e. you can access your converged network using a single ID from anywhere in the world with an IP connection.
- Scalability
i.e. you can add users with ease and without downtime.
- Network redundancy
i.e. automatic or rapid recovery of service if a network component fails.
As there is a cost-saving element to all the above, we did not list ‘Cost Saving’ as a category on its own.
There were a number of inventive answers that only one person gave, which are not reflected here. Other more exotic (albeit cynical) responses included
- "Because it's inevitable"
- "Because it’s cool and new"
- "Because you’re worth it!"
and our favourite:
But the jury is still out on whether the expected cost savings actually materialise when the leap to VoIP is taken. In fact, several respondents we spoke to said that cost savings were nowhere near what they had been expecting (or led to believe!).
On the current evidence, VoIP may take some time to deliver all that is currently being promised.