[*] Comments about VoIP presentation at CIPS

[John Lange]

Bill is being much more diplomatic than I was after seeing the
presentation.

The slide that got me most riled up is where they compared the worst
possible case for VoIP implementation with the best possible case for IP
Centrex and concluded (unsurprisingly) that there is no business case
for using VoIP in place of MTS Centrex.

Having firmly dismissed the "business case" for VoIP, they then went on
to tell us that in fact there really *IS* a business case for VoIP as
long as you buy the proprietary collaboration software from Nortel
(which happens to use IP as a transport) but really has nothing to do
with VoIP and certainly nothing to do with VoInternt.

The funny thing is, from what I could see of the slide (which was tiny
and 100 miles away) was their final "business case" used 100% soft
numbers to justify the solution. Things like "hours saved playing phone
tag" and "real estate costs saved from having employees work at home"
and all sorts of other numbers that didn't add up to much of a hard
bottom line.

-- 
John Lange
President OpenIT ltd. www.Open-IT.ca (204) 885 0872
VoIP, Web services, Linux Consulting, Server Co-Location

On Tue, 2005-05-17 at 23:07 -0500, Bill Reid wrote:
> The MTS/Sierra VoIP presentation at the CIPS dinner meeting raised some 
> interesting points but on the whole was not very helpful.
> 
> The interesting point was that to build a business case for VoIP you have to 
> explore the non-traditional voice features like; presence, Web access to caller 
> logs, call routing, multimedia, etc.
> 
> As John L. pointed out they completely missed the managed VoIP server(i.e. the 
> VoIP server is not customer managed or on the customer premises). This would 
> have been cheaper than the compared solutions(Centrix, IP Centrix, PBX and IP PBX).
> 
> This is an example of the growing split between the "VoIP" vendor solutions and 
> VoI (Voice over the Internet). The two sound like the same technology but it is 
> sort of like saying apple and oranges are the same since they are both fruit.
> 
> The future is VoI not VoIP.
> 
> VoI stresses interconnection which is what the PSTN is all about.
> 
> Vender VoIP solutions stress issues like QOS, Multimedia apps, proprietory 
> protocols (SCCP (skinny) or closed SIP extentions). The assumption is that you 
> are calling people running apps and hw from a single vendor.
> 
> Of course since the underlying technology is similar it gets confusing but the 
> two are really quite different. For example, ENUM and 911 support is very 
> important for VoI but basically irrelevent for vendor VoIP.
> 
> Skype is such a great application because it plays in the VoI world.  Of course 
> its limiting factor is that it is too closed at this time to be considered a 
> final solution.
> 
> Vendor VoIP will eventually merge with VoI and at that time apples will taste 
> like oranges. :-)
> 
> In the past there was AOL email, Compuserve email, BBS email, etc. and then 
> along came Internet email. They coexisted for a short time with gateways between 
> Internet and AOL, Compuserve, etc. But as with Internet email the solution with 
> the greatest interconnection(i.e. VoI) will win out.
> 
> -- Bill
> 
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