Some implementations prove to be a lot trickier, he says. Many organisations are simply not up to skill or speed, while others cannot make a decision, even after a year. Neil also points out that finding suitable customers can sometimes be tricky, because for some it’s still not worth the level of initial time and investment required to move to an IP telephony model, especially if they’ve recently made a large IT infrastructure investment.
One example he gives is of a large stockbroking house that has been running on reliable Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) technology, where there is more risk involved in changing the phone system. "Where every call is potentially worth thousands of dollars, it makes more sense to stay with what is currently working," he says.
IDC analyst Susana Vidal Little says that, when it comes to major IP infrastructure deployments, Australian channel players need to offer a customer a solution that fits their budget, business and technical requirements. Earning certification for each of the IP telephony equipment providers requires a large financial investment, but one that can ultimately be worth it because they can have a captive market, Vidal Little adds.
Neil says one of the greatest barriers to change was a general ignorance on the part of customers of what VoIP and IP telephony actually are. What NSC offers with its IP telephony deployments, Neil says, is true VoIP in a controlled environment over a LAN or WAN, not uncontrolled voice over IP out over the public internet, where there is no quality of service grading and there is no way 99.9999 percent reliability can be guaranteed.
Silver service
The ANU VoIP implementation comes on top of another large-scale Avaya IP telephony deployment for Melbournebased Silver Top Taxis Service, enabling the delivery of applications to remote sites. It also allowed the service to offer access to its technology infrastructure and customised applications to other taxi companies.
Silver Top Taxi Service has around 1850 taxis attached to its network. The Silver Service solution provides text-tospeech, which reads back customer address information, links mobile phones with location information and enhances the routing of callers identifi ed as having a current booking, NSC says.
Before the deployment, taxi companies had been fi elding enquiries for up to 90 cars using an agent who may only take a few calls through the night. It had not been cost-effective for these companies to deploy communication applications such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and text-to-speech, which help automate bookings.
Neil says the Silver Service solution was engineered to deliver applications such as text-to-speech to remote sites, which gave it the potential to increase successful automated bookings to about 33 percent, giving the customer significant savings and operational efficiencies.
"What this means for the taxi industry is that calls from satellite suburbs or anywhere in Australia can now come through to Silver Top Taxi Service’s new system and be handled by the IVR or text-to-speech system and cost-effectively handle dispatches," Neil says.
"Importantly, local operators remain in control of their business. The IP Telephony solution is simply providing cost-effective access to smart applications previously out of reach," he adds.
Silver Service receives some 500,000 calls a month, of which roughly 90,000 to 100,000 are automated with the company’s current IVR system.
With the introduction of text-tospeech, Silver Service hopes to increase the percentage of automated bookings from 20 to 40 percent.
The text-to-speech application reads the address contained in the database back to the customer, increasing customer confi dence in the booking. It also lowers administration costs and improves customer and driver satisfaction by capturing incorrect pick-up addresses prior to a dispatch.
NSC says earlier this year that strong growth in the telecommunications sector was expected to nearly triple its revenues to $100 million by 2006.
The company has relocated its Sydney head office from Epping to larger premises in North Ryde and has also added staff in Sydney and Canberra and opened offices in Adelaide and Perth as part of a restructure that divided the company into the two subsidiaries, NSC Enterprise Solutions and NSC Carrier Technology.
"For the past two years, we’ve had about 35 percent growth by revenue year-on-year and that’s encouraging," Neil says.
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