"The Connected Enterprise:
Unleash the True Potential of Your Enterprise VoIP"

 

1. Introduction

Enterprise IP telephony and Unified Communications have gone mainstream. Multi-service networks combining enterprise voice, video and data over a single IP-based infrastructure open up boundless possibilities to streamline enterprise communication processes.

Over the past three years, Unified Communications technologies made a real revolution in a corporate communications segment. A year ago, Gartner placed Unified Communications in the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009:

• Virtualization
• Business Intelligence
• Cloud Computing
• Green IT
• Unified Communications
• Social Software and Social Networking
• Web Oriented Architecture
• Enterprise Mashups
• Specialized Systems
• Servers – Beyond Blades

Hundreds of software vendors over the world suggest new ideas of unified communications applications and implement them in software products.

With this e-book, you’ll learn about the most popular unified communications software that can be deployed in your enterprise IP-telephony network. These solutions are classified and described in one place for you to:

• read about the business-goals that can be achieved with each solution;
• learn about its main features,
• get to know about issues regarding its integration with enterprise applications,
• obtain the top-list of vendors for each solution.

Whom is this e-book for?

If you plan to migrate to IP-telephony, you’ll learn about unified communications software available on the market and decide which one will be useful for your business. Knowing that, you’ll be able to prepare your migration plan more carefully by choosing solutions and vendors in advance to reduce software incompatibility risks.

If you have already deployed enterprise VoIP, you will learn how to extend the functionality of the existing IP-telephony network. Unified communications solutions, described in this e-book, can dramatically improve your business performance and provide a greater ROI in your IP-telephony network.

If you’re an IP telephony integrator, you might find new enterprise VOIP solutions and services to offer to your customers.

If you’re a managed/hosted IP-telephony provider, you’ll be interested in Unified Communications solutions that you may introduce as value-added services to your clients.

Before describing every Unified Communication solution in detail, let’s give a brief overview on VoIP, IP-telephony and Unified Communications.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. “IP-telephony”, “VoIP”, “Unified Communications” - Sorting out the Definitions
3. The Classification of Unified Communications Solutions
4. IP Contact Center - the Advantages Over Traditional Call Center
5. Voice Portal and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) - How to Process up to 80% of Your Incoming Calls Automatically
6. IP Call Recording - Why Record Interactions with Your Customers
7. Audio/Video Conferencing - What’s New in IP Conferencing Solutions
8. Presence Service - Reach Your Party with a Single Phone Call
9. Attendant Console - Manage and Dispatch Your Incoming Calls Effectively
10. Virtual Queuing - “Call Me Back”
11. Unified Messaging and Voice Mail - Get Any Message from a Single Inbox
12. IP Phone Applications - Your IP-Phone Can Do Much More
13. Call Accounting / Call Reporting - How to Manage and Track Your VoIP Communications
14. Enterprise VoIP network management - Keep Track of Your IP Telephony Configuration
15. Unified Communications Integration Issues and the Software to Cover Them
16. When to Consider Building Custom IP Telephony Software
17. Conclusions
18. About Alexander Anoshin
19. About BCS-IT

Everyone has probably heard about things like «IP-Telephony», «VoIP» and «Unified Communications». However, not everyone has a clear picture what all these terms mean, since there are numerous discussions, articles and opinions going on around.

So before proceeding with details, let’s start with the definitions of several technologies that change the way we communicate.

The «IP-Telephony» and «VoIP» terms are often used interchangeably. Nevertheless, there is a difference.

2. “IP-telephony”, “VoIP”, “Unified Communications” - Sorting out the Definitions

VoIP

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is a general term for several technologies used for transmitting voice over an IP network.

VoIP — is not exactly the «IP-Telephony» thing in the sense that will be defined later. VoIP can use public Internet to carry the voice traffic, for instance, Internet-radio.

Another way to use VoIP is to use IP-network to connect traditional phone systems. When doing so, the connection with an IP-network is administered by special gateways that can be either PBX modules or standalone devices. In this case, IP-network is a transit agent, so PBX users may not even know it exists. 

Connecting analogue PBX

Not any IP-network is suitable for VoIP to function. Packets with digital audio should be delivered without a loss and with minimum latency, otherwise there is a risk that restored voice will not be smooth anymore. To ensure the highest transmission priority of digital audio over other IP packets, there should be mechanisms that guarantee the quality of the transmission. In general, such mechanisms are known as QoS (quality of service). An IP-network with necessary QoS mechanisms for VoIP is referred to as a multiservice network.

IP-telephony

IP-telephony is a set of hardware and software that, together with VoIP technologies, enable voice communication over an enterprise using the IP as a native transport for voice and call signaling.

The main components of an enterprise IP-telephony network are:

• IP-PBX – software that has functions of a traditional phone system and is installed on one or several enterprise servers.
• IP-phones – the phones that get connected directly to LAN.
• Gateways – the devices that join an IP-network with traditional phone systems (PSTN and analogue PBX) or connect analog phones, faxes and modems to an existing IP-network.

Enterprise VoIP network topology

Compared to a traditional phone, an IP-phone has many more functions and, in some cases, it can even be used to replace a computer to organize a workplace.

IP-telephony forms a unified communication network, manages a set of available phone numbers, a set of specific services and availability of IP-telephony service for users regardless of their current location (that goes beyond just a main office and may be at a corporate branch, at someone’s home or even when someone is on a trip).

Corporate or regional branches are naturally integrated into an IP telephony network as soon as such a branch gets connected to a corporate IP-network. There is no need to setup a stand-alone PBX in a branch. Connecting IP-phones to a LAN, in this case, is enough.

Unified Communications

Unified Communications is a set of applications at the junction between “the world of computers” and “the world of phones”. The main purpose of Unified Communications is to speed up and functionally enrich interaction between company employees and the company and its clients.

The technological backbone of Unified Communications is IP-Telephony. But while IP-telephony solves the same tasks as traditional phone systems (though in a much more effective way), the Unified Communications is the way to optimize business process.

Enterprise VoIP network organization

Unified Communications software solutions optimize the enterprise business processes by integrating all the forms of communications (e-mail, IM, phone, video, mobile) and enterprise data.

So, let’s summarize: 

• VoIP is a technology used to transmit the data over IP network.
• IP-telephony is a set of software, hardware and technologies that use VoIP to organize a telephony communications over the enterprise.
• Unified Communications is a set of applications to integrate all forms of enterprise communications with business data.

Unified Communications solutions utilize the IP telephony system, which, in turn, is based on VoIP technologies. IP-telephony requires VoIP to send calls over the network, but VoIP does not need IP-telephony. Unified Communications require IP-telephony, but IP-telephony can exist without Unified Communications.

3. The Classification of Unified Communications Solutions

A large number of Unified Communications software is offered by the largest IP-telephony vendors, such as Cisco and Avaya.

Moreover, hundreds of software development companies all over the world develop IP-telephony solutions, aimed to cover the specific needs by introducing new features. Some of the 3rd party software solutions only work with an IP-telephony platform from a certain vendor, while others use the multi-vendor approach.

Leading IP-telephony solutions vendors pay close attention to independent IP-telephony applications developers that offer solutions, compatible with the platforms of the other vendors. To encourage 3rd party developers, IP-telephony vendors launch contests to generate new ideas for applications, form technology partner communities and grant their own marketing channels to promote third party solutions.

Let's list the solutions, offered by both IP-telephony vendors and 3rd party companies.

Customer Contact

• Contact Center
• Voice Portal / Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
• Call recording software

Group Collaboration

• Conferencing Solutions
• Presence service

Call Management and Dispatching

• Attendant Console
• Virtual Queuing

User Productivity

• Unified Messaging and Voice Mail
• XML-services for IP-Phones

IP-telephony Network Management

• Call accounting/call reporting
• IP PBX management

Another type of software to be considered is the integration tools, aimed to integrate enterprise IP-telephony with enterprise applications or external communications systems. The general integration issues are discussed in the “Integration Issues and Software to Cover them” chapter. Also, you can find the integration details related to a specific software solution in the appropriate chapter.

Also, there is often a need to build custom IP telephony software that meets specific business requirements. You can learn about when to consider building a custom designed solution in the «When to Consider Building Custom IP Telephony Software» chapter.

4. IP Contact center: the Advantages Over a Traditional Call Center

You can hardly overestimate the importance of a reliable contact-center, especially for a business with a significant number of clients.

Efficient client call-service has been a problem for many years already. Call-center service history started long before VoIP and Unified Communications technologies appeared on the scene.

First, call-centers were based on traditional analogue phone systems. Operators worked in huge office-halls, with their phones connected to a PBX with call-center software.

Rapid computerization process of the late 80’s - early 90’s lead to a computer-to-telephone integration (CTI) that in its turn made possible integration of the call-center service with CRM-systems and other enterprise software.

Finally, with the emergence of VoIP and Unified Communications technologies, call-centers were switched to IP-platform and call-center software obtained new features that allow processing customer requests received by e-mail, internet and so on. These all lead to the creation of IP Contact Centers that today dominate the IP-telephony networks market.

IP Contact Center – the Advantages of VoIP 

You have most likely read the numerous articles about great functions and advantages of IP contact centers. Let’s not repeat all that again, but rather emphasize the advantages of VoIP-based contact centers over traditional telephone systems.

IP Contact Center scheme

1. A Unified IP Platform to Process All the Client Requests.

The main purpose of an IP Contact Center is to provide the business with the unified platform processing all the client requests, regardless of their source. The same solution is used to process requests received by:

• phone,
• email,
• fax,
• website,
• live chat and instant messengers.

2. Geographical Independence in Deployment.

Another advantage of an IP Contact Center is its geographical independence in deployment - the operator of your contact center only needs to be connected to your enterprise LAN to accept and process client requests.

For example, contact-center units may be located in different offices of your company (in the same city, or in different regions and even in different countries) – in this case, an IP Contact Center will provide you with intellectual call routing over the distributed offices and branches.

With a geographically distributed contact center, you can use your human resources more effectively –

• form several teams of operators located in different offices,
• create remote workplaces, etc.

With such flexibility, you can involve extra personnel in your contact center to operate round the clock.

3. A Unified Network.

IP-technologies allow merging your data and voice networks into a unified infrastructure for you to:

• halve your network setup and operation costs,
• encourage common work standards that guarantee quality of your customer service,
• deploy 3rd party solutions in your VoIP network.

When you consider an IP contact-center as a solution to process all of your client communication requests, then an IP-based solution appears to be the only reasonable choice.

4. Client Service Unification.

As an IP-Contact Center processes all the client requests with a unified IP-platform, it allows you to unify the client service business processes and manage them centrally. With a unified IP Contact Center, you don’t have to support several business processes for processing client requests, received from several sources.

IP Contact Center Integration

The main issue of IP Contact Center deployment is its integration with existing enterprise information systems, such as CRM-systems, contractor databases and HR systems. Basically, there are 2 main goals of contact center integration with existing enterprise applications:

1. Integration for Intelligent Call Routing

As soon as an incoming call is connected to the contact-center and the phone number of incoming call is known, integration with enterprise systems can help the contact center software to automatically route it to an appropriate person/department. For example:

• using the city code of the incoming call, the contact center software can route the call to the nearest office in the city,
• depending on the client service business processes, the contact center can route the call to the most appropriate operator, who can be:
  • a manager that serves the calling client,
  • an operator that worked with this client last time,
  • a debt specialist should it become known that this client has debts overdue.

2. Integration to Increase Contact Center Staff Performance

As soon as a call is delivered to an operator, it is important to provide your operator with up-to-date information, which is stored in your CRM software.

Moreover, your company may have several heterogeneous software, which have various information about your clients. Your operator must have quick access to any of these systems to ensure efficient request processing. A contact center, integrated with these systems, will trigger them to automatically open the client card, once the incoming call is received.

You can also use integration to provide your operators with:

• a single sign-in to the software used in contact center,
• a single interface for time-out recording,
• a single interface for logging the contact call summary.

Special attention should be paid to the integration of IP telephony functions into the CRM interface or any other application used by your operators, as it allows your operator to receive, dial, redirect calls and perform other phone functions right from the application interface.

To solve the integration issues effectively, a custom application is often considered to integrate your contact center software with the existing enterprise applications, according to the business processes of your contact center.

IP Contact Center Vendors

Contact center solutions are offered both by leading IP-telephony system vendors and independent software development companies. To name the most noticeable solutions:

• 3Com Contact Centers by 3Com
• Aspect Unified IP Contact Center Software by Aspect
• Asterisk IVR Server (opensource VOIP project)
• Avaya Customer Service Editions by Avaya
• CCDesign Suite by NEC Unified Solutions
• Cisco Unified Contact Center by Cisco
• FrontRange IP Contact Center by Frontrange
• Intervoice IP Contact Center by Convergys
• IPFX Unified Contact Center by IPFX
• Genesys Intelligent Customer Front Door by Alcatel-Lucent
• OpenScape Contact Center by Siemens Enterprise Communications
• Syntellect Customer Interaction Manager by Syntellect

What to Do Next

So, an IP Contact Center takes the advantages of VoIP technologies to

• process every type of messages in a single place,
• obtain flexibility in deployment,
• drastically reduce installation and operational costs,
• have unified business processes to improve your service.

If you plan to deploy an IP Contact Center, you can start with the vendor list above to select and examine the solutions that support your IP telephony vendor and provide the functionality you need.

If you already have an IP Contact Center, you can consider the integrating ideas listed above that can be applied to your business to increase the performance of your client service.

5. Voice Portal and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) System: Process up to 80% of Incoming Calls Automatically

What is Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

With an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, you can optimize a process of incoming calls management to get the following main advantages:

• playback of previously recorded messages; processing of the information, entered by a caller in the tone mode, which may be used to route the call to an appropriate operator, who also gets this information in a pop-up;
• playback of information retrieved from databases and other information resources; for example, a caller requests a voice message on his or her bank account balance or currency exchange rates;
• processing of queued calls, when all the operators are busy; call processing may include playback of music, pre-recorded messages and information on the estimated remaining waiting time;
• a caller has access to the previously recorded messages and other dynamic information that may be accessed from the menu;
• an important IVR advantage is a graphic strategy designer system allowing you to quickly change the customer service algorithms.

Advantages of a Voice Portal over IVR systems

Nowadays, traditional IVR systems are no longer the best way to provide automated self-service, that's why many companies move from IVR to Voice Portals.

The main difference between a voice portal and IVR is the concept – while an IVR is a stand-alone application integrated with enterprise software to provide customers with the necessary info, a voice portal is just another (voice) interface to enterprise data in addition to your web-portal and other enterprise applications.

This became possible due to the introduction of the VoiceXML standard. This technology allows a voice portal to access to the enterprise data using the same middleware component that is used, for example, by a web-portal.

Therefore, instead of integrating a stand-alone IVR system with your back-end enterprise software, you can use a single server application that brings info from the enterprise systems both to web-portal visitors and to voice-portal callers, thus improving your customer service.

The place of a Voice Portal in IT infrastructure

Just like it is done with a web-portal, a voice-portal caller is asked for a password, when logging into the system. If the caller is already registered in the service system, then he can get information on your company and services. Access rights are managed on the server-side both for the web-portal and the voice portal and other interfaces to enterprise resources.

Voice Portal Integration and Custom Software

The main integration issue with voice portals is their integration with enterprise applications and this often requires custom software to be built. Voice portal integration allows your customers to:

• authenticate/authorize themselves in the voice portal;
• obtain the information available for them – the data will be taken from your enterprise applications and converted to voice responses;
• request certain actions to be performed that triggers changes in corresponding enterprise applications and databases.

The common voice portal functionality allows your:

• customers to get their status/tracking/balance information;
• employees to call to check in/out to update the time sheet database;
• prospects to locate your nearest dealer/store/branch;
• employee to initiate a call, enter his employee ID and listen to a recording with his job instructions for the day.

A voice portal can also be used for outbound calls to:

• notify your customers about order status;
• remind a customer about the appointment and request the confirmation.

To do this, a server-side component should be built and integrated with enterprise software that produces VoiceXML pages for a voice browser. When there is existing software for automated self-service (for example, a web-portal), then its existing components may be used to authorize/authenticate a voice portal user and interact with your enterprise software.

IVR and Voice Portal Vendors

IVR and Voice Portal are a part of the main contact center services that allow automated processing of up to 80% of contact center requests, forwarding the rest of requests to contact center operators. So, most of the contact center software vendors also offer IVR/voice portal solutions, though there are also companies who specialize in voice portal software and integrate it with Contact Center solutions from other vendors:

• Aspect Unified IP Voice Portal by Aspect
• Asterisk IVR Server (opensource VoIP project)
• Avaya Self Service by Avaya
• CallCenterWorX/IVR by NEC Unified Communications
• Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal by Cisco
• Holly Voice Platform by Holly Connects
• Intervoice Voice Portal by Convergys
• Genesys Voice Platform by Alcatel
• OpenScape Voice Portal by Siemens Enterprise Communications
• Syntellect Solution

What to Do Next

A voice portal simply acts as another interface to your existing back-end components, providing your clients with personalized sales data. The flexibility of the voice portal concept allows your enterprise to:

• adapt quickly to your changing business needs;
• lower support costs.

Now, before organizing a self-service for your clients, think about existing software components you use to access client-specific data – can they be re-used as a source for your Voice Portal?

6. IP Call Recording: Why Record Interactions with Your Customers

Contact center operators, public and private security personnel, salespeople communicate on the phone with thousands of people every day.

A right to record a phone conversation is provided for some business areas by law. In other cases, a recorded phone conversation may help you:

• settle disputes,
• monitor and improve customer service quality,
• get an accurate picture of customer interactions.

Depending on your business specifics, you might need to record all the phone conversations with your clients or allow your personnel to decide, when a conversation should be recorded.

Generally, call recording software can:

• manage phone channels;
• record calls;
• manage the recording modes for different users/groups - record on demand, all-time record or prohibit recording;
• store the for recorded calls in a single storage and its management.

IP Call Recording Integration

Custom applications will allow you to integrate your IP call recording application with CRM, call center software, compliance and security applications and collaboration solutions to leverage the value of call recordings.

Often, call recording software vendors offer APIs to their solutions for 3rd party companies to create custom integration solutions, for example:

• Contact Center - you may want to integrate the call recording software with your contact center to automatically record a call, identified by an agent ID, ANI, agent skills etc.,
• CRM – integration with a CRM system will automatically link the recorded calls to customer records, along with other customer interactions (emails, notes, files etc.).

IP Call Recording Vendors

Call recording software is offered by dozens of 3rd party software vendors. Some of them only work with a particular IP-telephony platform, while others support several industry leading IP telephony vendors.

To list some of the call recording solutions:

• Arc Call Recording by Arc Solutions
• iRecorder by Vocalcom
• CallREC by ZOOM
• Callrex by Telrex
• Carin by TC&C
• Impact 360 recording by Verint
• IPFX Call Recording by IPFX
• VPI Capture Pro by VPI

What to Do Next

So, most of call recording software provide the same functionality:

• record the calls using several recording modes,
• manage the archive of recordings.

But when choosing an IP call recording vendor, you should think one step ahead – do you simply need to record your phone calls or you want your recordings to be linked with other enterprise data? If so, pay attention to integration APIs the vendors provide.

7. Audio/Video Conferencing: What's New in IP Conferencing Solutions

Nowadays, you cannot imagine a geographically spread company without an audio-conference system, which have become more and more important even for smaller companies.

Today, these systems are built using the IP-protocol and that has several decisive advantages over the conferencing solutions for traditional phone systems:

• You can plug a video-camera into the system and do what analogue phone systems don't allow you to do.
• With you use an IP network for data transfer, it is not just a phone network - all you need to start a conference call is a connection to the IP-network or access to the internet.
• An IP-based conferencing system complements enterprise IP-network services, like e-mail, intranet, web-portals, ERP and CRM systems. So, the conferencing service is available right at your workplace, without going to a specially equipped meeting room.
• Your system administrator can maintain and administer your conferencing system remotely.
• With IP based conferencing software, you can share documents, record conference session recordings, communicate via a text chat, etc.
• You do not need special technical skills to plan a meeting, invite participants and manage the conference session.
• You can participate in the conference using any VoIP communication tool – an IP phone, Skype, an SIP phone etc. The only limit is the number of concurrent users.

What Professional Conferencing Solutions Can Do

The operators’ interface of an operator-assisted conferencing solution

Any IP telephony system allows you to launch a “simple” audio-conference. You simply assign a phone number for the conference session and anyone who dials it gets connected to the meeting, when everyone can hear everyone. If someone is outside your office, then a caller might need to dial a conference extension to get connected.

But, when you want dozens or even hundreds of people to be on air at the same time, more sophisticated professional systems come at play. Let's see what you need to remember, if you ever face such challenge:

Voice Arbitration

One of the key professional conference-system parameters is the number of full-duplex users, who can both listen to the call and speak up. However, if you hold a conference with, say, 100 people and all of them are full-duplex, then you run a risk of disrupting it. Why? Because sounds (not only voice of a speaker, but various background sounds as well) from 100 phones get in at the same time. That's why it makes sense to manage full-duplex users at a time with voice arbitration, which is a set of algorithms that manage “voice-rights” of conference participants.

Conference Moderation

The purpose of conference moderation is to grant a possibility to speak out. When you have several dozens of users in a conference, which is not moderated, any moot point will turn the session into a chaos with no one listening. To avoid that, you must have a conference operator interface that manages each participant by endowing or barring the right to speak.

System Cascading

With system cascading, you can setup several distributed conferencing units that can all be managed centrally using the conferencing software deployed at the headquarters. For example, if your company has several remote offices and your conference sessions can hold 5-10 employees from each office, you can deploy the cascaded conferencing software in each office and integrate them into the headquarters conferencing system. This will significantly reduce the requirement to IP network capacity and cut costs for the conferencing IP traffic.

Background Noise

If your conference participants have to communicate at places with significant background noise (like noisy streets, airports, concert halls and so on), then there's a risk that they will not be heard by others. Apart from moderating the conference as described above, you can also use a noise reduction system that separates and suppresses any disordered noise.

Conference Automation

When you hold conferences with a lot of people regularly, conference automation will help you to automatically invite the participants to the meeting and reconnect them in the case the connection is lost.

Other Audio/Video Conferencing Features

In addition to the above-mentioned benefits, you might do more with professional conferencing software:

• record a conference session and manage the records repository,
• generate reports on each participant time of presence and activity level,
• organize polling among conference participants,
• create private “chat-rooms” for a limited number of callers,
• secure access (with a login and password) to desired conference types,
• share the documents, desktop and so on.

Audio/Video Conference Software Integration

To streamline the conferencing processes, you can integrate the conferencing software with your enterprise applications:

• integration with a CRM system (or any other client database) will allow you to launch audio conferences using the CRM software interface;
• integration with your groupware solution will allow your employees to plan the conference in groupware (date, time, participants); this data will then go to the conferencing software, which will connect all the participants on the defined date and time; the same approach is applicable for other collaboration software, for example, e-learning – a coach can use e-learning software to plan an audio-conference as a part of his educational program;
• integration with a directory service (LDAP/AD) will provide the conferencing software with the up to date list of employees.

You can also integrate conferencing software with 3rd party web-conferencing solutions to participate in web-conferences by simply using your IP phone. When a web-conference starts, the system just places a call to your IP phone to invite you to the conference.

For example, such integration is performed by Cisco – after acquiring the WebEx, Cisco integrated it with Cisco Unified MeetingPlace to combine the on-premise voice conferencing with web-conferencing.

So, if your employees use web-conferencing software, it’s a good idea to consider integrating it with your IP-telephony network.

Audio/Video Conference Software Vendors

The conferencing software for IP-telephony networks is offered by both IP-telephony vendors and a number of 3rd party companies, which develop their conferencing solutions and integrate them with other IP-telephony systems.

• 3Com IP Conferencing by 3Com
• Avaya Unified Conferencing by Avaya
• Cisco Unified Meeting Place by Cisco
• Converge Pro products by ClearOne
• Converged Conferencing by ShoreTel
• Indigo ICS by Indigo
• Polycom Voice Conferencing Solutions by Polycom

What to Do Next

Basically, there are 2 types of conferencing solutions:

• conferencing software for small workgroups and project teams,
• solutions for large meetings in distributed enterprises.

Here’s how you can select a VoIP conferencing solution:

• examine the functionality required by your business needs,
• choose the software that supports your IP telephony network components,
• consider the bandwidth you need,
• pay attention to scalability and cascading,
• think in advance about integration issues,
• examine the API, if you need custom modules to extend the functionality.

8. Presence Service: Reach Your Party with a Single Phone Call

Presence service is a real-time service that gives you the information about the availability of your colleagues and their preferable ways to communicate.

The IP-phone interface of a presence service

Basically, with the presence service, your employees get two new opportunities.

At first, when you choose your co-worker you want to call, you can check his availability before placing a call.

The second benefit that the presence service offers is the ability to inform the communication network on your currently preferable methods of communication. When, for example, you are in the middle of important negotiations, you would probably appreciate a possibility to redirect all the incoming calls (office phone, mobile etc.) to your voicemail, but still let your boss reach you on your mobile. You simply configure the service, according to your preferences, and it will do the rest of the routine (like sending new status info to all the communication tools that your colleagues use to reach you).

How that could be useful for you or your sales force, who make so many calls in a day? With this service, you can guarantee that there will be no lost calls and the information about all the missed ones will be stored in a single place, waiting for your attention. You won't have to check numerous devices and voice-boxes to get this precious information any more. Take your time and work on every missed call without any haste.

When contacting your colleague with a presence service, you will see, if he is available before you dial his number. If your colleague has left the information about the preferable way to communicate you will reach him with the very first attempt. For example, if your party is on travel, the presence service will use his mobile number to establish a connection - you don’t need to phone several numbers (office, mobile etc.) to reach him.

Presence Service Integration

The first thing that comes to mind that can be integrated with a presence service is 3rd party communication tools. When you set your status in the Presence service, you may want to expose this information to IM, Skype and other communication tools you use. While advanced vendors have already integrated their presence service with communication software and provide API to perform this integration, you can integrate your presence service with communication tools and other enterprise software with some assistance of a specialized software development company.

Presence Service Vendors

• 3Com Presence Module by 3Com
• Avaya Aura Presence Services by Avaya
• Cisco Unified Presence by Cisco
• Alcatel-Lucent Presence Server by Alcatel-Lucent
• Indigo Presence Server by Indigo
• IPFX Presence by IPFX

What to Do Next

The presence service facilitates communications between your employees. Try to figure out the time you waste on failed attempts to reach your colleagues and apply it to the size of your company. Is it worth it to save that time with a presence service?

9. Attendant Console: Manage and Dispatch Your Incoming Calls Effectively

Attendant console is a traditional tool for receptionists to manage a large number of incoming calls and dispatch them to enterprise employees effectively.

In traditional analogue telephone systems, an attendant console is a phone, designed specifically for receptionists and pluggable extension modules.

 

The Aastra 560m attendant console

In IP-telephony networks, you can still use such devices, but VoIP technologies allow you to transfer all the functionality of the attendant console to software, which significantly reduces its price, makes it more flexible and extendable to your business needs.

The Cisco software-based attendant console

Now, let’s take a brief look at software-based attendant consoles for IP telephony networks.

Software-based attendant consoles provide your receptionists with basic features of incoming calls management and dispatching:

• support of several phone lines;
• call queues support;
• corporate directory with quick search functionality;
• call transfer (both “blind transfer” and “consultative transfer”);
• recalls management.

In addition, an attendant console with extra functionality only available in VoIP networks enables you to:

• provide your receptionists with extended information about user statuses and preferable ways to connect with presence services integration;
• keep the up to date list of employees and their phone numbers with enterprise directory or HR system integration;
• quickly send an email to the user using the interface of the attendant console;
• send a short text message to users’ IP phones;
• manage the queues of incoming calls (such as “sales calls”, “technical calls” etc), identify the incoming call and treat it according to the call queue priority with an intelligent call queuing engine;
• record calls.

Attendant Console Software Vendors

You can find a software-based attendant console, offered by major IP-telephony system vendors and, sometimes, you can find a basic version at no cost at all. There are also 3-rd party software vendors, who develop software based attendant consoles for IP-telephony networks.

• Arc Enterprise by Arc Solutions
• Cisco Unified Attendant Consoles by Cisco
• IPFX Operator Console by IPFX
• NEC Integrated Attendant Console by NEC
• NeXspan software attendant console by Aastra

What to Do Next

The software based Attendant Console solution provides you with a number of advanced functionality, like

• presence integration;
• directory management tools;
• options for distributed deployment that help your organization increase call answer speed and improve caller experience.

You can choose the attendant console that meets your business needs better from the vendor list above.

10. Virtual Queuing: "Call Me Back"

Virtual queuing is a concept designed mainly for contact centers, but it also can be used in any enterprise with a high volume of incoming calls.

The virtual queuing technology gives your customers an alternative to queuing. When all the operators/receptionists are busy, your clients can just leave their details and hang up instead of listening to music and “Your call is very important for us” for ages. The virtual queuing software places the unanswered call into a virtual queue, waits for an available receptionist/contact center operator and then automatically calls the customer back.

This, at first glance, very simple functionality brings additional benefits to your enterprise, because it:

• improves contact centre productivity by smoothing out call peaks;
• enhances customer satisfaction;
• increases sales by reducing the number of unanswered calls.

All the vendors below provide a simple “first in – first out” algorithm of virtual queuing. If you need a complex algorithm to first manage the unanswered calls from VIP-customers, then you should consider building a custom VoIP solution with virtual queuing.

Virtual Queuing Vendors

• Concierge by Virtual Hold
• QueueBuster by Netcall
• QLess by abIinventio

What to Do Next

Check the statistics of your PBX and answer these questions:

• How much unanswered calls do you have per month?
• How many customers have you lost?
• Are your clients frustrated by the long hold time?

You can examine the solutions listed above to solve these issues. When you need extra-functionality to manage your virtual queues, you can consider building custom software.

11. Unified Mesaging and Voice Mail: Get Any Message from a Single Inbox

Unified Messaging is the key element of Unified Communications concept that gives invaluable benefits to IP-telephony end-users.

The concept of unified messaging is that all kinds of messages like emails, voicemails, faxes and so on go to a unified mailbox, accessible both from your e-mail client and your phone.

So let us see what Unified Messaging can do:

The sources and interfaces of a Unified Messaging Account

Voicemail Messages

First of all, your voicemail inbox is a destination place for all the incoming calls, when you are not available. You will be able to access the saved messages from any phone at any moment or get those messages right from your desktop email client.

Fax messages in your mailbox.

Secondly, you do not need a fax-device anymore to view fax messages, because they will appear in a digital format in your mailbox right next to your voicemail messages. It is as easy to send fax messages – just send the target document to print and select the “fax” option instead of a printer. Note that some Unified Messaging systems may still need a fax-server to work with fax messages.

Access to your mailbox by phone.

Thirdly, you can access your mailbox via your phone in addition to your email client. Imagine you get into a traffic jam on the halfway to your destination, your laptop battery dies and you are waiting for a very important email. With the text-to-speech technology available with Unified Messaging, the system can read a vital email for you right on the phone.

There are two types of Unified Messaging systems:

1. Integrated Unified Messaging systems with the widely used email servers like Microsoft Exchange or IBM Lotus Domino that use their email boxes to store your voice and fax messages.

On one hand, it is a naturally expected and obvious solution. On another, it still has a couple of noticeable drawbacks:

• you can only use Exchange or Lotus as your mail server;
• a large number of employees started using mail server for receiving voice and fax messages will significantly increase its load.

2. The second type of Unified Messaging systems uses their own storage for voice and fax messages, but you can still access all the messages from the same email client. With this approach, it doesn’t matter what email server is currently used in your company. Also, both servers work independently, so when some of them is down, you still can use the other.

Unified Messaging Integration

When deploying unified messaging software in a heterogeneous network, the main integration challenge is its integration with existing 3-rd party communication systems – 3rd party PBX and fax-servers, legacy messaging software etc. Most of the unified messaging software vendors support some of the 3rd party IP PBX and fax servers, but for those that are not supported a custom integration tool might be required.

Since the goal of unified messaging software is to provide a single mailbox for your communication channels, another way to use it may be to integrate it with communication tools that are not supported originally. For example, you may want your unified mailbox to receive SMS messages, pager messages, etc.

Unified Messaging Vendors

• AVST Unified Messaging by AVST
• Cisco Unity by Cisco
• CommuniGate Pro Messaging Suite by Communigate
• FrontRange VoIP by FrontRange
• InTouch Unified Messaging by AudioCodes
• Kinesis by ActiveVoice
• Modular Messaging platform by Avaya

What to Do Next

Unified Messaging is one of the key Unified Communications solutions that allows you to receive all your messages from any source and access them from any device.

While unified Messaging solutions are offered by both IP-telephony system vendors and 3rd party software developers, you can examine the solutions that support your IP telephony network and choose the one that suits your requirements better. You can also use custom development services to extend it with additional functionality, specific to your business.

12. IP Phone Applications: Your IP Phone Can Do Much More

You can do much more with your IP phone, than with your ordinary phone, because:

• IP phone applications (XML services) show interactive content on the display of your IP-phone;
• you can interact with data from server-based applications via your IP phone just as easy as you use your web-browser to work with your enterprise software;
• you can send and receive data over your network with your IP phone.

With IP phone applications, you can create and deploy services for your IP-phones, tailored to your enterprise needs.

Let’s introduce a classification of IP phone applications and list the most used ones.

1. Information Services

As an IP-phone is a small “always-on” computer, you can quickly access useful information, such as:

• an address book: when your IP phone application is integrated with your enterprise directory (Active Directory or HR software), you can use this service to find your colleague quickly using a number of filters(by name, by phone number, by department etc.);
• content delivery services: this type of services deliver any content to the display of your IP phone in real time; that may be weather information, exchange rates, stock prices, flight numbers, etc;
• streaming audio: allows you to broadcast audio in real-time (for example, using Satellite/FM/AM radio or MP3 player ) to IP phones.

2. Communication Services

The enterprise directory on an IP-phone display

These services streamline your enterprise communications, such as:

• broadcasting: you can make announcements (either live messages or pre-recorded ones) to the selected group of your employees using the speakerphones of their IP phones;
• text messaging: you can send a quick message to your colleague, who will see the message on the display of his IP phone;
• security alerts: this service can immediately alert your security when:
  • somebody places a 911 call,
  • a panic button is pushed or a fire alarm is detected;
• an IP phone service that requires a PIN code to be entered to be able to place a specific call.

3. Interfaces to IP-telephony Software

Any of the IP telephony applications mentioned in here has a full-featured interface. But often you can use a simple IP phone interface with:

• the presence service: you can quickly change your status and the preferred way of communication;
• audio conferencing: you use your IP phone to view the list of participants, send them text messages, ask for a voice (in operator-assisted conferences) etc.

4. Interfaces to Enterprise Applications

The IP phone interface to a conferencing solution

Using the IP phone as an interface to your enterprise software will allow you to improve your business processes without using a PC. For example:

• an interface to ERP software can allow your employees to sign-in and sign-out from work using their IP-phones; work hours per employee are transferred directly to the ERP software;
• an interface to groupware will help you reserve resources or facilities that are shared by groups, departments or individuals;
• integration with surveillance cameras will take the camera images directly to your IP phone.

So, the contemporary IP phone is a small “always-on” computer that can even replace a PC in some cases.

Custom IP Phone Applications

The IP phone applications (XML services) listed above are just examples of what an IP phone can do for you in addition to placing and answering calls. Depending on your business processes, you can either consider the software that already exists on the market or build custom designed IP phone services that exactly meet your enterprise needs and are integrated with your existing enterprise applications.

You might want to consider building a custom IP phone application, because:

• you only get and pay for the functionality that exactly meets your business needs as your IP phone service is designed exclusively for your network, complying with its unique characteristics, which are not covered by existing solutions;
• you can integrate it with your legacy enterprise applications that are not supported by the software you need;
• it is built with technologies already used in your enterprise to reduce the cost of deployment and maintenance.

IP Phone Application Vendors

• AND Phone suite by ANDTEK
• Arc Voice office by Arc Solutions
• InformaCast by SingleWire
• IPMagix product suite by IPMagix
• IPsession package by IPcelerate
• LiteScape OnCast by LiteScape
• SMARTApps suite by NexLabs
• Syn-Apps IP Telephony Solutions by Syn-Apps

What to Do Next

IP Phone Applications (XML services) extend the functionality of your IP phones and you can benefit from them, if you:

• decide, which services will increase your employee productivity;
• examine the vendors to be sure their solutions provide the functionality you need;
• think about your existing applications to be integrated with IP phone applications.

Also, this is just a rough overview of what IP phone services can do and there is an unlimited number of ways you can use your IP phone in your enterprise, so you can consider building a custom IP phone application to meet your business objectives more precisely.

13. Call Accounting / Call Recording: How to Manage and Track Your VoIP Communications

The call accounting and call reporting software has appeared along with the first phone calls.

The history of these applications is as old as the telephony itself. Without any doubts, every business needs to know what phone calls it pays for. With traditional call accounting software you can:

• track long-distance “friends & family” and other unnecessary calls and re-bill your employees,
• bill your clients for phone charges made on their behalf, because you have precise info about each call made,
• verify your long-distance phone bills.

All of the above is aimed to reduce your telecommunication costs.

What Have VoIP technologies Changed in Call Accounting Software?

With IP telephony deployed in your company, your phone calls to remote offices go through your IP network, so there are no toll charges and you only pay your ISP.

You can also eliminate your long-distance calls, if you partner with a VoIP network provider to route your international calls over the Internet to their gateways located in remote sites, which, in turn, route your calls to the local PSTN.

So, VoIP technologies have dramatically reduced the cost of phone calls, but even in VoIP environment call accounting software can still bring significant benefits to your business.

Allocate Phone Calling Costs Among Your Departments

With detailed reports, provided by call accounting software, you can allocate your telecom costs among your departments and divisions to analyze their expenses and profitability more efficiently.

Manage Your VoIP Traffic Effectively

Call accounting software allows you to analyze the VoIP traffic on each of your gateway and optimize its location in the most effective manner.

Motivate Your Sales People

As you have detailed reports about phone calls made by each sales person, you can measure his performance, compare it to others and manage your sales stuff accordingly.

Monitor Your VoIP Network

The real-time tracking of your phone calls will let you know immediately about lines you’re getting no traffic on, trunks overloaded etc.

Call Accounting Software Integration

Now let’s take a look at integration issues to be considered before you deploy call accounting software in your network.

First of all, you should be sure that the call accounting software you get will track all the phone calls in your company. Thus, it should support all the PBX systems used in your network. For those 3rd party legacy PBX systems that are not supported, a custom integration component can be built to parse the CDR records and import the data into your call accounting application.

Secondly, you may also need integration with ERP software. For example, you may want to automatically add telecom expenses, allocated among your departments, to your ERP software on regular basis.

And of course, when talking about allocating costs among departments, the call accounting system is to be integrated with your employee database (AD, LDAP directory or HR software).

Custom Call Accounting Software

As you can have up to date data about your employee phone calls, you can use it to build custom business-specific modules that help you to manage your telecom expenses better.

For example, you may want to set the limits for long-distance calls for your offices, departments or employees, so that once the limit is reached, the long-distance phone calls get blocked for a certain group of users until the administrator removes the limit.

Since most of the call accounting vendors allow 3-rd party applications to access the software data, you can use this information in any way you need, according to your business processes.

Call Accounting Vendors

Below you’ll find a list of several call accounting software vendors that support a range of mostly used IP PBX.

• CallTrack by TelSoft
• Call Accounting Mate by callaccounting.ws
• Call Accounting software by ISI Telemanagement Solutions
• Reliatel by Tone Software
• Shadow CMS by Resource Software International Ltd
• SierraGold by SAI
• VeraSMART by Veramark Technologies
• WinCall by Telemanagement Technologies

What to Do Next

The call accounting software gives you opportunities to manage your VoIP costs. How do you select the call accounting software?

• Check the supported PBX systems.
• Check, whether the web-interface is available.
• Learn about the analysis and reporting features.
• Examine integration capabilities.
• Learn about customization methods available to provide you with custom reports and extra-functionality you might need.

14. Enterprise VoIP Network Management: Keep Track of Your IP Telephony Configuration

When extending your IP telephony network up to several hundreds of IP phones and more, an enterprise meets specific management challenges:

Inventory Management

Managing a large VoIP network with hundreds and thousands of IP phones requires careful IP phone tracking along with their allocation to employees. For example, when an employee leaves a company, you must mark his IP phone as “available” to allocate it to another employee. Otherwise, you may have unused IP phones, when nobody knows about their availability.

Phone number management

You need to keep track of phone numbers used in your company and configure the IP PBX accordingly lest your enterprise directory contains invalid and irrelevant phone numbers.

An increasing volume of day-to-day tasks

When you have a thousand of IP phones in an enterprise or more, the volume of routine procedures for IP-telephony administrators significantly increases. The most common procedures are:

• assign a new IP phone and a phone number to a new employee,
• reallocate IP phone and a phone number, when an employee leaves the company,
• change employees IP phone and number;
• configure call forwarding, when an employee is absent for a long time.

But the interfaces of most IP PBX are too complicated and these routine procedures require high-skilled and expensive specialists.

To solve these issues, you can use VoIP management software, integrated with your IP PBX and an HR application, to:

• track changes in organizational structure (maintained in HR system),
• automatically generate tickets for IP telephony administrators, when there are changes that need to be reflected in IP PBX configuration,
• provide an easy to use GUI for IP telephony administrators to process the tickets,
• make the corresponding changes to the IP PBX configuration.

In short, with the right software, you can simplify the management of your IP telephony network, because

• routing chores can be performed by a specialist without deep knowledge in IP PBX configuration, so
  • you can cut your expenses for IP telephony network management;
  • you motivate your IP PBX administrators by having them work on more interesting tasks;
• the configuration of your IP PBX always corresponds with your organizational structure, so the phone numbers are always valid;
• you keep track on your IP phones – you have an up to date information about which IP phones are used, and which are not.

VoIP Network Management Integration

As described above, your VoIP network management solution should be integrated with your HR system. If your HR system is not supported, you need to integrate it with a custom developed tool.

You can also integrate your inventory system with the VoIP network management software to track, when a new IP phone is in use or available.

VoIP Network Management Vendors

• PhonEX™ Pro/M.E.IP.S® by MIND CTI
• ACTS by BCS-IT

What to Do Next

A VoIP network management solution lowers your expenses for IP telephony network management and facilitates PBX configuration.

• Find out how much time your administrators spend to perform the activities described here - they can use it for other more valuable purposes.
• Check, if your enterprise phone directory is up to date – if not, a VoIP network and inventory management solution can help you.

15. Unified Communications Integration Issues and Software to Cover Them

Since the mission of Unified Communications (UC) is to optimize enterprise business processes by unifying communication channels and enterprise information systems, the challenges of UC integration come to the forefront.

Some companies offer ready to use software that cover most of the integration requirements. But very often an integration tool needs to be developed as a custom solution, because of enterprise IT-infrastructure specificity.

Communications integration challenges can be of several natures.

PSTN Integration

Since integration with a PSTN is a critical requirement for an IP-telephony network, all the IP-telephony vendors provide gateways for integration of their IP-telephony platform with a PSTN. These gateways are also used for smooth migration from legacy PBX systems.

Integration of Heterogeneous IP-Telephony Networks

Another issue is integration of heterogeneous IP-telephony networks during merger and acquisition deals. Most of the leading IP-telephony vendors provide integration tools that allow their platform to be integrated with an IP-telephony network from one of the other vendors.

The integration challenges arise, when the 3rd party unified communication software used in an enterprise doesn’t support multiple vendors. This issue can be solved by building a bespoke gateway that allows the software to work with the IP PBX that it didn’t originally support.

In this case, integration of existing IP-telephony software with a heterogeneous IP PBX and IP phones is a good alternative to purchasing new software with multivendor support.

Integration of Enterprise IP-Telephony with 3rd Party Communication Software

This is where an indistinct “Unified Messaging” term appears, which usually means inclusion of incoming faxes and voicemail to one’s email inbox. But there are much more integration challenges, such as:

• integration with 3rd party VoIP software – for example, a gateway that allows incoming Skype calls to be received on your IP-phone;
• integration with 3-rd party web-conferencing software – Cisco’s acquisition of WebEx in 2007 is the first thing comes to mind;
• SMS gateways that allow you to use an IP phone to send and receive SMS messages.

Lots of integration products are available on the market that integrate IP-telephony network with the most useful communication software.

Nevertheless, some companies use a unique set of communication tools as a corporate standard. In this case, integration of existing communication software with IP-telephony requires a custom solution to be developed, which is often less expensive, than migrating to new communication tools.

Integration of a Unified Communication Solution with Enterprise Software

A more interesting challenge that we often meet is integration of IP-telephony software with enterprise applications. These are just several typical examples of when it is required:

1) Integration of IP-telephony software with an HR database: the changes in organizational structure should be reflected in the IP-telephony application user database.

This can be achieved by building a synchronizing service that traces the changes in a HR database and triggers modification of the IP-telephony software database.

2) Integration of a contact center solution with several heterogeneous customer databases to boost the contact center productivity: an incoming call should open the corresponding application, showing the customer card, and, conversely, an operator must be able to initiate a phone call using the interface of any customer database.

This can be solved by an integration tool built using SOA, when the contact center software is integrated with the bus that has connectors to every customer database used.

3) Integration of a call accounting application with billing software for the reports generated by the call accounting software to be automatically exported to the billing system.

A custom designed tool will transform call reports to the billing system format.

4) Integration of a voice portal with enterprise applications to authenticate the caller and provide him with the appropriate status/tracking/balance information.

So, integration of IP telephony solutions with existing software will help you incorporate your enterprise communications into your business processes.

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.

17. Conclusions

Hopefully, you’ve learned from this e-book that with the right VoIP technologies, you get full control over your enterprise communications.

Unified Communications solutions allow you to effectively manage your communications and integrate them into your business processes.

Armed with the knowledge, you can consider, which solutions will

• let you use your enterprise VoIP network at its full potential;
• increase performance of your business;
• increase your ROI in the IP telephony system.

This e-book describes the most popular unified communications solutions available on the market. But you should keep in mind that you’re not limited to the functionality existing solutions provide. Depending on your business needs you may

• customize the software,
• integrate it with your enterprise applications
• develop your own custom designed VoIP solution that fits your specific requirements.

Share the E-book

If you found this e-book useful, please spread it among your colleagues, who would appreciate increasing the effectiveness of their VoIP networks, and earn some goodwill among them:

• email the link to the download page or the e-book file itself, if they expect it from you;
• share the e-book page on your social networks:
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• write about it in your blog;
• tell us your opinion on the book and what it should've had: we appreciate your insight.

18. About Alexander Anoshin

Alexander Anoshin is the CEO of BCS-IT.

In the last 12 years, he worked on managing and executive positions in software development companies. Over the past several years BCS-IT, headed by Alexander, works on software development projects in the field of enterprise IP-telephony. A variety of projects performed gave Alexander an intimate knowledge of enterprise VoIP solutions, which is expounded in this e-book.

Feel free to contact him at Anoshin@bcs-it.com

19. About BCS-IT

BCS-IT is a software development company specializing in software solutions for enterprise VoIP. Established in 2001, it performed a dozens of software development projects for its clients worldwide.

You can be confident that you will get quality enterprise VoIP software from BCS-IT, because:

• the developer team has extensive experience in building custom
  • call management and call distribution software,
  • queue management solutions,
  • XML services for IP phones,
  • call reporting applications,
  • IP audio/video conferencing software,
  • call recording applications,
  • IP telephony network management software and
  • many other custom solutions for enterprise IP telephony;
• a mature development process and rigorous Quality Management System guarantee that you get
  • high quality software,
  • software right on time and within your budget;
• you work with people, who understand your business needs, goals and processes.

Feel free to contact us to learn what you can get from the BCS-IT team.