Project Charter

ComGroup, Inc., an independent telecommunications consulting and management firm in Bellevue, WA, was commissioned by AVST and Avaya to contact owners of large-scale voice messaging systems (500 or more users) and identify significant issues affecting their systems, particularly networking and cost of ownership. It was of interest how AVST's OmniBridge® might have affected their costs and options. This report, while not an evaluation of OmniBridge, examines the role it might play in making major system decisions and reducing cost of ownership.

Methods and Results

Hundreds of calls were made to organizations with large AVST and Avaya systems. Many had "enterprise" systems &mash; multiple sites and systems with thousands of users. A survey was provided to participants so that the same questions were asked of each organization regarding their issues, plans, and costs.

It was not surprising that most of those contacted were pressed with routine and sometimes not so routine support of their systems and users. What was surprising was how few had specific information about the cost of owning their existing systems. Today's leaner departments may be spending more time coping with system and user demands and less on operational reports and documentation. Perhaps as a result of this apparent phenomenon, a variety of information was obtained, but not the same information from all participants. The examples selected for this report are those we found to be representative of the survey and consistent with our experiences with our own clients. We think these experiences would apply to other organizations in similar situations.

"Networking" is used here to mean the hardware, software, and transmission protocols that permit voice mail messages to be sent between separate, often geographically distributed, systems. "Cost of ownership" is used here to mean cost to buy, maintain, or enhance systems to support the organization's objectives.

OmniBridge® is a networking gateway that allows for voice and fax message transmission between voice messaging servers that don't support a common networking protocol: it bridges AVST CallXpress® unified messaging systems with Avaya's Octel® voice messaging systems by performing all needed gateway and protocol conversion functions.

ISSUES

The examples we use in this report identify issues that seem to be shared by many large organizations, represent industry trends, and provide implications for other Avaya and AVST voice messaging system owners. They include a software development company, a university, an engineering firm, a healthcare organization, and a manufacturing company. More extensive descriptions of them are in an Appendix to this report, but their identities are withheld by request. Below are some applications we found typical for networking using a gateway.

Upgrading Systems for Unified Messaging

Unified messaging (one-stop retrieval of all messages regardless of type — e-mail, voice, fax) is increasingly desired to improve communications and lower total business costs, and this helps to drive the need for networking. Most respondents wished to use an existing Wide Area Network (WAN) because it was already there.

The software development company we contacted elected to replace all Avaya Octel® systems with AVST CallXpress® systems and implement new Exchange servers at all locations so it could provide the benefits of networking, including unified messaging, and support it over their WAN. While a good solution for this firm, it was a big project and many organizations may not have the capital or capacity to implement such a broad change so quickly.

An alternative for others with Avaya and AVST systems that are planning a complete conversion would be to implement gateways in selected locations to allow a phased transition by retaining OctelNet analog networking where appropriate and implementing CallXpress WAN/LAN networking elsewhere. OmniBridge would make conversion easier by providing interoperability between new and existing systems as replacements are made over a longer period of time, easing the impact on budgets and resources.

Integrating Newly Merged Firms

Typified by the health care organization, firms acquiring and merging new entities into their organization want the ability to immediately implement voice messaging to new locations. They do not want to risk being distanced from each other by operating as separate entities with a negative impact on the productivity of the workforce and quality of customer service.

For such a company having Octel and AVST CallXpress systems, implementing OmniBridge could allow multiple locations to integrate their many messaging systems without a wholesale replacement of systems and without retraining all users and local system administrators.

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