Voice is changing within the Enterprise

I’ve been working recently on several voice projects for large corporates. For many years I have not been overly impressed with the business justification for the move from TDM to VoiP. The issues of reliability, cost and reduced VoiP functionality made me fell uneasy, even though I come from a data – as opposed to voice – background.

Now I finally think VoiP is a dead duck. My definition of VoiP being the replacement of TDM fixed phone technology with IP based fixed phone technology. Product developments by Cisco, Microsoft and even Google over the past twelve months are starting to render VoiP obsolete.

Finally Unified Communications is coming to the fore. I’ll define UC in a later post but for now here is a quick presentation on where I think fixed voice is going over the next 4 – 5 years.

More to come on this subject.

Intel WAN traffic 2004 – 2008

Intel publish their IT performance each year. I’ve extrapolated the Wide Area Network figures and I am not surprised to find the explosive growth in demand that the Intel IT team have had to meet in WAN traffic. I do hope they negotiate a good deal with their WAN provider that at least includes year on year reductions in price per terabyte.

Thanks to Intel for the openness in providing the data, the report is valuable for the whole IT industry.

Spend Less on Networks: part 1

2009/10 wont be the year to go ask your CIO or CFO for millions of dollars on new IT equipment

In the network space that shouldn’t be too much of a problem

In fact you’ll be able to go to your boss and tell them two things:

1 – I will sign a deal this year that will reduce our spend on networks (relative and finitie)

2 – At the same time I will transform the network estate into a single global unified service with the latest collaboration technology without investing any precious capital

Enterprise spend millions of dollars a year on the run costs of their underlying infrastructure:

LAN, WAN, Voice, Mobile

Many companies spend millions of dollars a year investing in new equipment

There is wide variance in the way that enterprise procure and manage their networks

Improving on key areas of network provision will save millions of dollars