Switching to Voip

After just a few years in existence, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has made the shift from an emerging technology to a viable business solution. More and more businesses nowadays are switching to VoIP because the technology provides a measurable cost savings, simplifies the delivery and management of communications, and facilitates convergence for more flexible business. Businesses that have already made the switch to VoIP gained competitive advantages over their competitors.

Founded in 2004 in Fremont, CA, the heart of Silicon Valley, Deeya Energy (DE) is a clean tech company dedicated to developing and manufacturing electrical energy storage systems. DE targets the large-scale energy storage systems which can act as back-up power sources for commercial applications, such as telecommunication towers, or electricity grid storage. I work for an IT consulting company that DE contracted with to oversee its IT department. I was assigned to be the on-site System Administrator with a full-time schedule at DE to support its employees and the IT infrastructure (Deeya, 2011).

DE was found by a group of engineers who used to work for NASA. They learned about the technology while developing the energy storage system for NASA. The project was then abandoned by NASA, so these engineers took off and started DE in order to continue developing what was left off.

The company started in 2004 with less than ten employees. Operating in such a small scale, it didn't need complicated IT infrastructures as well as telephone system. It had a basic IP network that connects a few servers, workstations, and printers. In addition, it had a private branch exchange (PBX) telephone system that ran on a separated network than the data network. That means DE has to build and maintain two separated networks: one for data and one for telephone.

With 3 physical phone lines from the telephone company running to the PBX system, users at DE are able to make up to 3 calls simultaneously. The PBX system allows users to see and control the calls directly, manually, using buttons while the PBX route the calls to the correct destination.

These networks were adequate to get the company running at its early stage. However, after just two years, its business picked up as clean energy products become more popular. Many investors became interested in the products being developed at DE and gave it the investment funds it needed in order to expand. DE went from having 8 employees to 100 employees in just 2 years. With so many more users, the data and telephone networks ran out of capacity to support all the users.

The company's solution was to add additional switches so that they would have more data lines for new employees. For the telephone side, more PBX expansion cards are added in order to create more telephone extensions for the growing number of users. With more extensions being added, the number of physical phone lines also needs to be increased in order to accommodate the increasing number of calls being used simultaneously. DE increased its phone lines from 3 to 10 to satisfy the demand.

After two years in operation, DE's development process becomes more and more costly to operate in the U.S. DE decided to shift some of its development processes to India in order to cut down the development cost. Another office means that DE has to build another data network and another telephone network. In addition it has to join these networks so that the data and resources can be centralized and unified.

The two data networks are connected by a dedicated optical data line with a bandwidth that is capable to handle both DE's data and telephone usage. However, only the data side took advantage of this optical data line. The telephone systems remained two separated PBX systems which raised the total monthly costs for telephone.

Now with two offices operating in two continents, DE's monthly phone bills skyrocketed because of the number of international calls being made between the offices. In addition, conference calls between the two offices lack the video and sharing capabilities. In order to make video conferences, DE used the PBX to deliver voice and the data network to deliver video. However, this method is not very effective because the two systems were not designed to work together so the consistency between voice and video do not match up. There are obvious performance and quality issues regarding this method of delivering conference calls.

Another problem that DE had with the PBX system is that it lacks the capability of soft phone feature. When remote users are working from home or on the field, they cannot be reached via the company's extension because those extensions are only available at their office desks. That means that DE has to supply these remote users with another mean to communicate while they are on the field. DE's solution for that problem is to provide those users with cellular phones which drive up DE's total monthly costs for communication.

DE needs to converge its voice and data networks so that it can reduce communication costs, boost employee productivity, and adapt to its changing business conditions. One of the best ways to converge these networks is to adopt a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone system to replace the PBX and take advantage of the optical line that already has the capacity to carry phone data.

VoIP introduced a simple yet profound innovation in telecommunication: the ability to transmit voice over a data network. Traditionally a phone system rely PBX equipment and phone lines connected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). VoIP bypasses this conventional telephone hardware, transmitting voice over the company's existing data network. The system converts the signal digitally and sends it by voice data packets through an Internet Protocol such as a standard broadband connection or the corporate intranet. VoIP can also access the public switched telephone network, allowing calls to be routed to conventional land lines (Kaufman, 2008). This compatibility between VoIP and the public switched telephone system enables DE to migrate to VoIP gradually without having to abandon their legacy system.

To begin with, VoIP technology can run on the same data network that the servers, desktops, and printers are connected to which means that DE