16. When to Consider Building
Custom IP Telephony Software

Despite the hundreds of IP-telephony software vendors, who offer a wide range of out-of-the-box products described earlier, there is a number of software development service providers that specialize in developing custom software solutions in the field of IP-telephony.

Let’s discuss, who needs custom IP-telephony software, when is it needed and what benefits a custom solution can bring you.

Basically, building custom IP-telephony software should be considered in 2 cases:

• you need to obtain the exclusive intellectual property rights (IPR) to sell the developed software;
• the software available on the market does not meet your or your client’s business-specific requirements.

Building Software from Scratch to Obtain Exclusive IPR That Allows Selling It

This case usually refers to the software vendors, who need their software to be developed from scratch to obtain exclusive IPR to be able to sell it to their clients.

These vendors could be both companies that build IP-telephony applications and those, who need their existing software products to be integrated with IP-telephony networks.

IP-telephony software vendors develop their solutions in-house, though they often use offshore outsourcing services to reduce development costs and get access to extra development resources.

If you produce software solutions, which are not directly related to VoIP, you may want to integrate your solutions with IP-telephony to:

• add a feature to your CRM or groupware to initiate a phone call using existing software GUI;
• develop a software connector to IP PBX that allows, say, a billing system or general ledger software to automatically extract the data about phone calls made across the enterprise from an IP PBX;
• add the support of an IP PBX and IP phones to your network monitoring and management software.

In that case, it is a good idea to consider a specialized software development company that has enough expertise to develop such features, test the software with its IP-telephony testing environment and deliver the results along with the source code and full IPR.

Building Custom Software to Meet Your Specific Business Requirements

Custom designed software addresses the unique business processes of an enterprise and the gaps in packaged application functionality. When the software that meets your specific requirements is not available on the market, you should consider developing a custom application, tailored to your business that integrates with your current enterprise systems.

Companies, who meet these challenges, are usually midsize and large businesses or system integrators who deliver software solutions to businesses.

From our experience, custom applications for IP-telephony network can be of several types:

• tools to integrate the IP telephony network with the enterprise software to optimize business processes, as described in the “Unified Communications Integration Issues and the Software to Cover Them” chapter;
• additional modules to the existing software that extend its functionality;
• software applications built from scratch that provide exclusive functionality of IP telephony network to the business.

Though, sometimes, integration of IP telephony software with enterprise applications and extending its functionality can be performed by a vendor at extra-cost, but, often, it’s better to turn to a 3rd party company that provides such services because:

• a software vendor can refuse to develop extra-functionality, if it does not meet his product strategy;
• the cost of software vendor services may be excessively high.

Read the next chapter: 17. Conclusions

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