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With the world becoming flat, communication costs are on the rise. Enterprises are now spread all over the world, even in very remote corners, and with the ever-increasing need for constant communication, they are facing soaring communication costs.

IP telephony or whatever name you call it by (Voice over IP or VoIP)/Internet telephony, Broadband telephony, Broadband Phone) has become an affordable alternative for enterprises to keep in touch internally as well as externally.

According to a Gartner survey, voice and data convergence based on IP telephony and VoIP will be under way in more than 95% of major enterprises by 2010. Convergence will drive additional classes of communications-enabled business applications and cause an upheaval in the telecommunications industry. The report states that by 2010, 40% of enterprises will have completed the convergence of all their voice and data networks on to a single network, and more than 95% of large and midsize enterprises will have started the process. So what is IP telephony? Wikipedia defines it as the routing of voice conversations over the Internet or through any other IP-based network.

Why IP?
Indian enterprises are cost conscious and are always looking at finding ways to better leverage their existing infrastructure investment. Reduction in communication cost is one major benefit of implementing IP telephony. The savings come due to the use of a single network to carry both voice and data and become more pronounced when users have existing under-utilized network capacity, which they can use for IP telephony without incurring additional costs.

It's not just about cutting costs but also increased functionality. Mobility is also enhanced with the use of IP telephony as users can route incoming calls to their VoIP phone whenever they are connected to the network irrespective of where they are. Also, for India, a major use of IP telephony is in the call centers. The call center agents can work from anywhere if they have a fast and secure Internet connection.

According to IDC, IP Telephony is advocated mainly because it allows new applications to be integrated on the legacy system of the client, which are otherwise very difficult to implement using traditional telephony at reasonable cost. VoIP is one such application, which makes it possible to have an office phone at home with a VPN.

Businesses are looking at VoIP to simplify their networks and reduce cost of call and operational costs. Moving forward, IP-based solutions will enable enterprises to deploy different services, which the operators will be forced to offer in order to beat competition.

"The idea of location-independent services in the network means that an enterprise can use a building-block approach for migrating its communications to IP on a site-by-site, group-by-group, or application-by-application basis" -Ranajoy Punja, VP, Advanced Technology, Cisco Systems

Enterprise Implementation
Enterprises in India are now looking beyond using IP telephony only for voice calls and are looking at integrating video using video phones in IP telephony. Birlasoft is one such company. The company has around 450 ports deployed for IP telephony and has invested around $3,00,000 for implementation. Says Pushpendu Roy, head, IT, Birlasoft, "We are using IP telephony in optimizing our existing infrastructure and communication cost in leveraging convergence technology. Having already implemented IP telephony in our organization, the next step for us would be to implement Unified Messaging whereby the voice mails stored on telephone instruments can be made available to users as e-mails with voice messages as attachments. There are also options to integrate Video using Video Phones in IP Telephony."

IPT is going to be an integral part in the future roadmap of Aztecsoft. The company plans to connect all its offices in India as well as worldwide with IPT. Currently, the company is in the process of implementing around 250-300 ports as a prototype. Based on the performance and value creation it plans to further up this number.

Lapp India is also planning to implement it but its GM, IT, Venugopal C feels that the kind of service provided in India is definitely not up to the mark: "There is lot of packets loss, which hamper IP telephony in a major way. Packets loss is a major area, which service providers need to look into."

Key Verticals
IT and ITeS is one vertical, which started with a bang and is one of IP telephony's largest vertical segment; next comes BFSI.

As Dinesh Sehgal of Avaya says, "When IP telephony started four-five years back, the call center industry was being set up, growing mainly due to the cost arbitrage advantage. It made a lot of sense for people setting up call centers to deploy IP on their backbone. With more applications being added, IP telephony is now cutting across all verticals-education, manufacturing, etc.

"For Cisco, within the enterprise segment, banking and financial is one of the most important verticals," says Ranajoy Punja, VP, Advanced Technology, Cisco Systems, adding, "Other important emerging verticals for Cisco in India include manufacturing, retail, media and entertainment, healthcare and pharma. These verticals are increasing their IT spend to achieve competitive differentiation and building global capabilities."

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