Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Considerations to Secure a Strong ROI
Topic: Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Considerations to Secure a Strong ROI
Choosing a solution to replace your legacy voicemail and call processing solutions with a next-generation Unified Communications solution can be extremely challenging. Most notably, your next-generation solution must deliver the quality and capabilities of your legacy systems while leveraging the value of your current and future voice and data infrastructure investments. In addition, your new solution should also support enterprise mandates for increased business and user productivity, business continuity and application centralization.
Many organizations have multiple and potentially conflicting priorities for their infrastructure investments. Your organization, like so many others, is probably served by legacy voicemail systems that are long overdue for replacement. In today's economic climate, the prospect of a "rip and replace" initiative is not only overwhelming, but downright unaffordable.
AVST has extensive experience interfacing with and supporting worldwide enterprise customers and has established "10 Considerations to Secure a Strong ROI" for enterprise IT/telecom teams to consider when evaluating organizational plans for the adoption of Unified Communications (UC).
- Disparate PBX/switching infrastructure
- Transitional IP Telephony (IPT) deployment strategy
- Legacy voicemail retraining
- Extensive legacy call processing requirements
- Multiple, disparate and evolving e-mail clients and stores
- Unified messaging (UM) issues: compliance, confidentiality, configuration, capacity and cost
- Centralization and Consolidation
- A la carte feature delivery for different segments of workforce
- Virtual desktop to maximize mobile worker productivity
- IT Reliability
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Voicemail to Unified Communications - 10 Considerations to Secure a Strong ROI
Choosing a solution to replace your legacy voicemail and call processing solutions with a next-generation Unified Communications solution can be extremely challenging. Most notably, your next-generation solution must deliver the quality and capabilities of your legacy systems while leveraging the value of your current and future voice and data infrastructure investments. In addition, your new solution should also support enterprise mandates for increased business and user productivity, business continuity and application centralization.
Many organizations have multiple and potentially conflicting priorities for their infrastructure investments. Your organization, like so many others, is probably served by legacy voicemail systems that are long overdue for replacement. In today's economic climate, the prospect of a "rip and replace" initiative is not only overwhelming, but downright unaffordable.
AVST has extensive experience interfacing with and supporting worldwide enterprise customers and has established "10 Considerations to Secure a Strong ROI" for enterprise IT/telecom teams to consider when evaluating organizational plans for the adoption of Unified Communications (UC).
1. Disparate PBX/switching infrastructure
Depending on the size and geographic footprint of the enterprise, there are typically multiple PBX makes and models and/or Centrex systems enterprise-wide. This disparate infrastructure creates an extensive interoperability requirement in order to deliver a single Unified Communications solution to the enterprise.
Note: AVST research of enterprise customers confirms that 74% of enterprise customers have at least two PBX brands deployed in their organization and 29% have five or more PBX brands deployed in their organizations, making telephony infrastructure interoperability one of the most critical issues to consider when developing a UC strategy.
CallXpress®, from AVST, has the most powerful telephony interoperability capabilities of any enterprise-class UC solution on the market with more than 400 PBX, IP-PBX and Centrex integrations, which allows you to leverage the useful life of your existing infrastructure. Whether your organization has an Avaya®, Alcatel®, Cisco®, NEC®, Nortel®, Siemens® or Mitel® telephony system, CallXpress can integrate with it. In fact, it's one of the few Unified Communications platforms to support multiple integrations – both traditional telephone systems and IP phone systems – on a single system.
2. Transitional IP Telephony (IPT) deployment strategy
A full 75% of all enterprises plan to deploy IPT over time and therefore have a long-term requirement to support a hybrid PBX/Centrex/IP-PBX environment during the multi-year transition period to full IPT. During this time, many enterprises are also seeking to deliver UC solutions to their workforce.
With its ability to support multiple PBX/IP-PBX integrations simultaneously on the same platform, CallXpress is an enterprise's bridge to IPT by enabling the natural evolution of the telephony systems, while delivering best-of-breed Unified Communications capabilities seamlessly across the evolving telephony infrastructure.
3. Legacy voicemail retraining
Given the typical size of workforce in the medium to large enterprise, AVST has found that the preference of the IT/telecom support staff is to transition to a UC solution that has a similar telephone user interface to their legacy voicemail solution, thereby minimizing the cost of workforce retraining in both dollars and time.
CallXpress supports more legacy telephone user interfaces than any other product on the market, including the Octel® Aria®, Octel Serenade® (VMX), Avaya INTUITY™ AUDIX®, Nortel Meridian Mail Mitel NuPoint with Centigram interface, Kinesis and Repartee. Moreover, these interfaces can be provisioned on a per-user basis, thereby enabling an organization to support, with one CallXpress system, multiple legacy sites that might have previously used different voicemail interfaces.
4. Extensive legacy call processing requirements
The large departmental structures of the typical enterprise create a very intensive call processing and fax environment.
CallXpress (including RightFax®) is the most powerful enterprise-class call processing and fax solution on the market today. With three decades of continuous development and 15 million users worldwide, CallXpress supports more legacy call processing and voice messaging features than any other solution available.
5. Multiple, disparate and evolving e-mail clients and stores
The e-mail clients and stores of enterprises are typically extensive and quite varied even within the same geographic footprint. CallXpress, with its ability to integrate with virtually any e-mail environment (premise and the cloud) on the market, as well as its ability to support multiple e-mail environments on the same system, can uniquely deliver Unified Communications capabilities to the significant number of enterprises with this profile.
Additionally, if you are considering a change to your groupware solutions in the future (for example, Microsoft Outlook and Office 365, Lotus Notes, Google Gmail, Novell GroupWise and any IMAP4 compliant e-mail system), the flexibility of the CallXpress solution to any of the competing solutions enables you to move forward with your second-generation IPT and UC deployment knowing that, if and when you decide to change groupware, the CallXpress solution will support them. This "future proofing" value proposition of the CallXpress solution is very appealing to IT/telecom teams as they try to make sense of the competing claims of the various groupware vendors about the benefits of their future solutions.
6. Unified messaging (UM) issues: compliance, confidentiality, configuration, capacity and cost
Unified messaging has become an area of increasing interest for enterprise customers. Depending on: (a) an enterprise's position on voice message retention; (b) an enterprise's concern about the preservation of the confidentiality of corporate conversations; and (c) an enterprise's concern about additional UM requirements for e-mail storage capacity, the ability to choose the correct architecture for an enterprise's UM solution (server-based, client-based, secure, simplified or hybrid) today, and the flexibility to change it in the future to support the evolving requirements of the enterprise, can be critical UC strategy considerations.
Ensuring that you understand these five considerations (5 C's) is critical to your successful UM deployment.
- Consult with your corporate compliance officer or legal counsel to ensure you pick the UM architecture that best meets your organization's compliance requirements.
- Thoroughly understand your organization's requirements for protecting the confidentiality of corporate data to ensure you select the correct UM architecture for your business.
- Ensure that you fully understand the implications of deploying each different UM configuration that vendors offer.
- Understand the full capabilities of each UM solution you are evaluating such as: What are the features and flexibility of the solution? Does it meet the requirements of your users that will be accessing the solution via the desktop, web, phone, and/or mobile device?
- Develop a clear set of cost, configuration and support guidelines and apply it to each UM solution you are evaluating. Consider a five-year TCO timeframe to ensure that you have the whole picture.
With the most flexible UM solution available, AVST has been delivering UM solutions to thousands of customers for nearly 20 years. CallXpress offers all four UM architectures – sever-based, client-based, simplified and secure on a per-user basis. This unparalleled flexibility enables you to safely deploy UM today while maintaining the ability to change how you deploy UM in the future without requiring additional licensing.
7. Centralization and Consolidation
With tighter budgets for IT/telecom staffing, enterprises are demanding centralization and consolidations. AVST has helped hundreds of organizations with their data center consolidation efforts. Regardless of your business challenge: looking to reduce cost; increase business continuity; or disaster recovery initiatives – AVST has the right solution to modernize your infrastructure.
- Multiple Telephony Integrations
- User Time Zones
- Different Dialing Plan Support
- Survivable Call Servers for High Availability
- Disaster Recovery
- Multi-Lingual Language Support
- Legacy TUI Emulations
- Scales up to 384 Ports - Supporting 40,000 Users
- Proven: Hundreds of Private Cloud Deployments
8. A la carte feature delivery for different segments of workforce
Because different segments of the enterprise workforce typically have varying communication requirements, the ability to create different "classes of service" and deliver different solutions to different population segments within an organization is critical when considering UC solutions.
The licensing and provisioning flexibility of the CallXpress platform enables enterprises to meet the varying communication requirements of their different population segments and as a result, achieve superior economics as enterprises only buy the licenses that they need. Organizations may choose to deploy voicemail only for 900 employees, and unified messaging for 100 mobile employees, as an example. The unlimited voicemail box licensing structure of the CallXpress solution is also very appealing to larger enterprises as they replace their large legacy voicemail systems.
9. Virtual desktop to maximize mobile worker productivity
The workforce of the typical enterprise has increasing requirements for enterprise connectivity while they are mobile and/or operating remotely.
The mobility aspects of the CallXpress solution enable the enterprise to present a single externally facing unified solution to customers while meeting the evolving mobility and connectivity requirements of their workforce. The CallXpress Personal Assistant is at your service to manage your calendar, contacts, route calls based on your location and availability, notify you of missed calls, perform interactive call screening and more. Plus all these features are driven through a speech interface to ensure continued productivity whether you are in the office, in your car, stuck in an airport or without an Internet connection.
10. IT Reliability
The IT staffs of the typical enterprise are seeking solutions that can be plugged into their current telephony/IT environments as well as support their future planned and emerging IT, IPT and UC initiatives. The CallXpress solution is designed to provide maximum reliability, while being easy to provision, maintain and update.
CallXpress offers a variety of deployment options to ensure business continuity and application reliability objectives including:
- Multi-server architecture to minimize single points of failure;
- Fully-synchronized, uninterrupted hot standby server;
- Redundant server components; and
- Built-in system reliability
Examining the AVST Advantage
AVST delivers the industry's most interoperable UC platform bringing best-of-breed UC-Voice, UC- Mobile and UC- Business Process solutions to the enterprise. Unlike virtually every other UC vendor, AVST does not constrain customers with a single vendor lock-in approach. In fact, it's the very opposite. By connecting new and existing technologies, AVST frees organizations from the constraints of a closed, single vendor lock-in approach, unlocking the full potential of their communications infrastructure.
With over 15 million users worldwide and three decades of innovation excellence, AVST is unifying communications®. To learn more about AVST, please visit www.avst.com or follow us at Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.
