Wednesday, July 25, 2007

How to reduce hidden costs and find secret savings in a VoIP rollout

Network World

Networking Technology Update




Networking Technology Update, 07/25/07

How to reduce hidden costs and find secret savings in a VoIP rollout

By Robin Gareiss

One of the key issues in implementing VoIP is cost. Until around 2005, organizations that implemented VoIP did so because of its real or perceived cost savings over traditional telephony.

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In many cases, they did find substantial savings by eliminating costly third-party contracts for moves, adds and changes (MAC), reducing the amount of cabling required in new buildings, or leveraging idle capacity in their data networks. Indeed, those savings existed, but so did additional costs -- effectively negating any net savings for the first 12 to 18 months.

For the past two years, cost savings has been a secondary driver to "futureproofing" the network. IT executives see IP as the platform for the future, and they want to be prepared for new applications -- starting with voice -- within a converged infrastructure. As a result, they are more accepting of VoIP's hidden costs, such as consulting, training and ongoing maintenance.

The focus has shifted from proving the business case of VoIP vs. TDM to the business-case vendor comparisons. In other words, it's no longer a matter of whether a company switches to VoIP; it's a matter of when.

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Contact the author:
Gareiss is executive vice president at Nemertes Research. She can be reached at robin@nemertes.com.

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