[*] Comments about VoIP presentation at CIPS

Sean A. Walberg sean at ertw.com
Wed May 18 07:45:20 CDT 2005


What kind of companies were they using as examples?  We recently finished 
an RFI and RFP for our company (~1200 sets, 10 locations, 500 agent call 
centre) and VoIP was a given.  Even upgrading a legacy Avaya platform 
required using new processors, which are essentially Linux boxes.

>From our experience, significant (hard) cost savings were found in

- self management
- reduced communications costs (being able to use our data pipes for voice 
rather than separate lines)
- reduced hardware costs by using routers as voice gateways instead of 
dedicated gateways
- ongoing costs (software, hardware, and maintenance)
- MACs

Soft costs were found in
- faster access to newer call centre features
- responsiveness to requests (ie a managed service takes days to implement 
a change, under self managed we can do it immediately)
- raised floor space
- other call centre stuff, like web and fax integration
- support for virtual (home based) workers and agents
- better network (one network to manage instead of two)

Some systems allowed for traditional hard sets and an IP backbone between 
sites.  An IP set was usually the same or slightly cheaper than the 
traditional hard set.  We could also justify the cost of LAN upgrades 
because of the reduced capital costs above, and some of the soft costs.

Sean

On Wed, 18 May 2005, John Lange wrote:

> 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.
> 
> 

-- 
Sean A. Walberg <sean at ertw.com>                    http://www.ertw.com 


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