Unifying Your Voice (Over IP) | BTalk Australia

VoIP can help cut the cost of your telecommunications, but it’s the rich features of Unified Communications that will really make a difference to your business.

That’s the view of Sara Adams, Regional Manager for Small & Medium Business at Cisco. In today’s “BTalk Australia” she talks to Phil Dobbie about what Unified Communications can do for your business.

Click on “Play” above to hear the podcast.

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Read white papers and other Unified Communications resources here.

• Today’s Transcript:

Dobbie: G’day I’m Phil Dobbie. Voiceover IP it was all a rage a year or two ago. Is it still around? That’s today on BTalk Australia.

Every business would like to slash the cost of telecommunications.  Is voiceover IP one way of doing that?  We’re joined by Sara Adams regional manager for small and medium business at Cisco.  So where is voice over IP heading?  What sort of growth are we seeing in sales of VoIP to the business community here in Australia?  Is it still on the rise?

Adams: It’s absolutely on the rise. And, I guess to start off I’d just like to clarify there’s a lot of confusion in the market around VoIP and another term called unified communications.

Dobbie: Right, so what’s the difference?

Adams: The VoIP itself is really just voice over IP networks. That’s the concept of putting voice calls across a data network. What unified communications is in a lot of small medium business customers that we talk to haven’t actually heard that term, so, I think the industry has to do a little bit better in marketing what unified communications really is. But, they understand what the individual components are. And what unified communications is, is not only putting voice calls over the IP network, but really utilising the technology to integrate so you can unify your voicemail and your email boxes so you have one location where you can pick up your messages. It’s being able to have presence capabilities on either on your phone your PDA or your PC. So, you can understand if someone’s on the phone or someone’s in the meeting or if they’re available to be contacted.  So, it reduces phone tag. There’s the ability to connect when a phone call comes in to a CRM system so that customer information pops up when someone gets a phone call. So, unified communications is almost the next evolution of voice over IP. And that’s really where businesses start to see productivity enhancements in their business.

Dobbie: Now is a lot of that just too complicated for people to get their heads around? I mean on your basic phone system, just on an ordinary switch system I mean the likes of Telstra, you can do a lot with your phone these days in terms of forwarding and messaging. But I think a lot of people have difficulty getting their head around how a lot of that functionality works. To take it one stage further is, you know, perhaps beyond a lot of people’s imaginations. Is that a part of the problem?

Adams: Well, I think a lot of people understand it. I think the problem the industry has is we’re using the terminology that people don’t quite understand.  When we actually walked them through the concept imagine if you would that you’re out and you’ve got a PDA where you can see email and any voicemails from your office voicemail system are automatically transferred to your mobile phone. Is that a benefit? And they go, yes. And we go well that is what Unified Comms is. So I think we make it more complex than we need to because the actual concepts are fairly simple. And most people get it can actually see a business product activity improvement right away.

Dobbie: Now, do you need to switch all your voice communications over to voice over IP to benefit from these Unified communications?

Adams: Yeah, they’re all based on IP networks. And I think if we look at, you know, if we’ve got a business who’s sort of going “should I go voiceover IP, should I go unified communications”, we see a lot of sort of trends if you will. If I look at a small to medium business with one site, the ability to do voice over IP on its own isn’t such a huge cost saving because a lot of times there are internal calls just within that one site. So, they’re actually going to voice over IP, you start to get cost benefits when you have multiple sites.

Dobbie: Right, plus, I guess the competition’s getting more intense and the fixed phone providers they’ve brought their cost down an awful lot over recent years.

Adams: They have, they absolutely have.

Dobbie: So it’s more about the functionality. But also what about the quality because, you know, with VoIP you’re compressing the voice? So, does that mean that the sound quality is not going to match up to what we’re normally hearing on phone calls?

Adams: I don’t believe so. But, to be honest that’s actually the carrier. So, the service provider that’s providing you the services for your data network, your IP network, it depends on the quality of service, the tagging that they’ve put on the systems depends on what kind of quality you get. So, I mean, currently I’m talking on a VoIP network. And Cisco runs our business and we have 65,000 employees globally. And we’re talking all over the world all the time. And I’ve never had voice quality issues. It’s completely perfect. But, that’s based on the service that we get from our service provider. So that’s really up to the carrier.

Dobbie: OK and you called me so …

Adams: Yes, I did call you.

Dobbie: … and actually this is probably the clearest line we’ve had, you know, all the time we’ve been doing these interviews, for weeks we’ve been doing these interviews, so that’s good. So, voice over IP though or all unified communications. Let’s start with VoIP first of all, to me it sounds like it’s going to be complicated to set up. The user might say, you know, integrated unified communications, my head’s starting to whirl and I’m starting to think, “oh this is sounding complicated and expensive to establish in my business”.

Adams: Well, it’s one of those areas that we actually see a lot of people adopt it over time. So, it’s not something that you have to do in, you know, what’s termed as a forklift upgrade. You can migrate. So, we actually talk about the phases of adoption of the unified communications and usually the first phase is when someone migrates from a traditional, you know, PBX system to a voiceover IP network phone system.

Dobbie: Right.  So, that first stage first of all I have to throw away my old PABX and buy a new integrated voiceover IP system or can I use my old hardware?

Adams: It depends on what hardware you’ve got. But most IP systems do work with analogue systems as well.

Dobbie: But I’d be losing some of the benefits obviously if I were to …

Adams: You would be, and it’s one of those things, I find with most customers you get used to hitting a certain grouping of buttons to do a call forward or to check your voicemail. And when you switch a phone system, yeah, you have to relearn that. But the minute you’ve learnt that you kind of go I can’t remember any other way of doing it and that that way becomes the easy way of doing it. So, it’s all just a matter of, I find, getting used to it.

Dobbie: So, what’s the first step beyond, you know, the basic phone system? What’s the first step most people take in terms of upgrading to a unified communications solution?

Adams: Well, the phases that we see is OK if you do the initial migration. And a lot of times people just pilot that in portions of the business. And so they do leave their PBX system up and running in some parts of the business and trial VoIP and get comfortable with it in other parts of the business. Then what we see is they usually then go into accelerate where they extend it across their entire business so that everyone can benefit from being able to do easy move adds and changes, and simple basic VoIP features. From there we tend to notice that they then start to look at ways that they can get a competitive advantage. So they start to transform their business unit using the unified communications. Then, what they’ll do is they start to include, so they’ll get their customers and their partners so, you know, the example I might have said earlier about if a call comes in and the CRM system pops up with the information around that caller. So that’s where you start to extend it out to your customers and partners.  And then, sort of the final phase of adoption is when it’s really, really leveraging it. So no one can tell if you’re working from home, if you’re working from the office, if you’re on a mobile phone because calls can be seamlessly transferred from one system to another system to, you know, you can be using a soft phone on a PC and you don’t even actually have a desk phone. And all of that becomes transparent and no one can tell where or how you’re working.  So, that’s sort of what we refer to as boundary free communication.

Dobbie: The boss is going to find it hard to check up on you to find out whether you’re at work.

Adams: Yes and no.

Dobbie: So is this the way most large corporations in Australia are operating now, is voice over IP and unified communications, is it common or is it still very much on the upward curve in the top end of business?

Adams: At the top end of town, I would use the phrase common.

Dobbie: Right.

Adams: And we’re really starting to see sort of the middle-size enterprise really start to embrace it and really start to push the envelope of what they can do with it. And we are seeing small medium businesses understand, probably not across the whole unified communications yet, but understanding components, what features they really can get a benefit from.  So we’ve actually had a lot of growth from the small to medium business marketplace.

Dobbie: So, consider the advantages, I mean the smaller businesses are perhaps got you know the most to gain here because that ability to have the call routed to wherever you might be, whether you are in the office or at home without the customer knowing and that’s a huge benefit for small business.

Adams: It absolutely is. We actually find it’s the teleworking component that is usually the lure because most small businesses operate either it’s the owner running around 24 hours a day and wants to be able to be reachable or using a lot of part time staff who have to work a few days a week from home or don’t even have the office space.

Dobbie: The mobile phone’s increasingly important. And voice over IP has always been, traditionally been a fixed line infrastructure I guess it can apply to mobile phones. The cost savings are not going to be great though because we’re talking about data charges the moment you start delivering voice over IP to or from your mobile phone.

Adams: Yeah, and it all depends again on the packages. We’re starting to see the carriers themselves get very creative in how they’re packaging up those mobile minutes. But also, mobile is part of the unified communications package. So, a call can get transferred when it’s inside the network of the office.  It picks it up and becomes like your landline. So, mobile charges stop. But, when you walk out of the office it automatically realises the network and starts to transfer it seamlessly to the user, transfers it over to the GSM network and starts being charged like a mobile phone call.

Dobbie: Right. OK, which would be a big saving because a lot of mobile phone calls are actually made in the office to other people in the office.

Adams: They absolutely are, yes.

Dobbie: Alright, that’s great — thanks so much for your time today.

Adams: No problem.  Thank you.

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