IT Doesn’t Have To Wait To Start Migrating Enterprise Telephony To OCS-based UC
While business managers in enterprise organizations may just be starting to research their operational business needs to identify and prioritize their UC requirements to improve business processes, IT management must also prepare to migrate existing telephone systems into the coming UC environment.
For the many organizations that are considering deploying the latest version of Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS 2007 R2) for their UC infrastructure, NET’s newest VX series gateway with Enhanced UC Features, offers a very practical, cost-savings approach for flexibly integrating existing enterprise telephony with the PSTN, SIP trunking, different PBX systems, and various UC applications provided through OCS. This migration can be done very selectively to support specific individual end users (e.g., mobile staff), specific locations, or for specific business groups as needed, rather than everyone at once.
As has been stressed many times, UC is not a single communication system, but a concept of flexible, interoperable communication applications that supports different user interface needs. UC must also be able to integrate with a variety of enterprise business process applications to enable such applications to initiate contacts and to interact with individual end users, both inside (internal staff) and outside (business partners, customers) of an enterprise organization. This also means that communication access for UC applications must support network and device independence, if necessary through appropriate gateways, in order to allow for UC-based contacts between people and any business process applications they communicate with.
The flexibility for Microsoft’s OCS to support a variety of SIP service providers or ITSP’s is also enhanced by NET’s demarcation gateway approach as a certified Microsoft partner for OCS gateways, With NET, it increases the number of supported, approved SIP carriers from three to eleven, and also directly supports a wide list of WAN interfaces.
While it will take time to properly analyze, plan and implement all the potential,high-value business process solutions that can be communications enabled (CEBP) for UC, IT management doesn’t have to wait, but can safely start moving forward with integrating existing telephony capabilities for end users deploying Microsoft’s OCS server and UC applications.
What Do You Think? You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360
You say at the beginning of the post: ” IT management must also prepare to migrate existing telephone systems into the coming UC environment.”. I have seen these kind of expressions on lots of websites, blogs etc. Do you know how many organizations didn’t migrate, how many of them still use traditional PBXes, and don’t plan to migrate? Is there a web site with the list of organizations, small, medium, large, that didn’t migrate? I just want to understand how large UC potenatial is?
I don’t have any such figures about IP telephony migrations, but I am sure that they are not high.
The main factors that will drive such activity, in no particular order, are:
- New “Greenfield” site
- End-of-life of existing telephone system
- End -user/Business management demand for UC capabilities that will be too difficult or expensive to achieve with existing set-up.
- Desire to consolidate and centralize telephony technologies to simplify and reduce costs of IT management and support.
Needless to say, migration to IP Telephony can also include the option of utilizing hosted, cloud-based services, rather than an enterprise-owned system.