Corporate Telephony Strategies for Enterprise Customers and Organizations

The goal of this book is to give an overview of different corporate telephony strategies for enterprise customers and organizations who want to modernize their telephony systems, have to define a corporate telephony strategy and select a solution. Content: • The book covers ISDN and Voice over IP technologies in a short overview. • Typical characteristics of existing enterprise telephony solutions for corporations of different sizes are explained. • An overview of Voice over IP covers the general concept of the technology, advantages, challenges, relevant standards and their market acceptance. Typical building blocks of Voice over IP solutions and their tasks are explained. • The book discusses different strategies a corporation may follow to establish enterprise-wide Voice over IP services and the challenges a customer may be faced. • The book answers questions like: - Should we "do nothing" or "upgrade our existing systems"? - Cloud service or hosted solution? - Solution of the same vendor or select a solution of a new vendor? - Open source versus vendor-specific solution? - Traditional PABX vendor versus Cisco or Microsoft? • "Do nothing" or "upgrade our existing systems" are the first explained strategies. • "Select another PABX vendor" shows the main differences to what you have already. • Chapters "Solution of Cisco" and "Solution of Microsoft" provide a short description of the vendor´s strategy, the typical characteristics of these solutions, available applications, the main differences, the openness of the solutions for future enhancements and the impacts of the changes. • "Free and Open Source Solution" gives a short overview of available software. The solutions are explained from a customer´s perspective and shows the advantages, but also the risks and challenges for the IT department and the whole corporation. • "Hosted / Co-location solution" explains the typical characteristics of such services and who should consider them. • "Cloud solution" explains the difference to a hosted service, the typical characteristics and who should select such a service. • A link collection with the names of vendors of telephony and UC&C (unified communications & co-operation) solutions helps to find the right contact. • The chapter "The Future of (Telephony) Communications Services" identifies the next communication services coming soon and provides a link collection to solutions changing all our communications behaviours. • A brief checklist helps to identify important selection criteria and to specify your personal request for information or request for proposal.