Cisco phone used voip

* Voice over IP is one of the most talked-about technology trends of 2004 and, in contrast to a few years ago when it had its last hype wave, products are available that can actually deliver enterprise class telephony. Although most of the chat in recent months has been about consumer services, with giant telcos like AT&T moving towards mass VoIP offerings alongside pioneers like Vonage and open source alternatives like Skype, in the last two months, attention has swung back to the corporate installation with a string of high profile deals in companies not known for investing in new technology on a whim. Three contracts in particular, signed with Cisco by Bank of America, Ford and Boeing, have instilled new confidence in VoIP, and in Cisco's ability to supply it, after much speculation that the market leader was being eclipsed by its challengers.

FORD MOTOR

Telco SBC Communications is to design, implement and manage an IP telephony system for more than 50,000 employees at Ford Motor's world headquarters and other facilities.

In a collaborative effort, Ford will own the infrastructure and manage its data network while SBC provides phone services as a managed application, said Brian Buffington, executive director of managed services at SBC. The project is SBC's largest ever IP telephony deployment.

Ford is looking to maximize its operating efficiencies by turning to IP telephony at its Dearborn, Michigan main office and 110 other company facilities in south eastern Michigan, according to the carmaker. For example, the technology allows for easily setting up employee phone assignments when they join the company or move. Most of the sites, including the headquarters, will be switched over to about 90% IP phones, some running over Wi-Fi.

The system, to be rolled out at Ford over the next three years, is based on Cisco equipment and will combine separate networks at Ford into one IP-based infrastructure that carries data, voice and video, according to an SBC statement. The telephony system will be based on the SBC PremierServ IP Telephony Advantage platform, using the Cisco IP Communications system and about 50,000 Cisco IP telephones. SBC PremierServ Managed Care engineers will work on-site at Ford facilities, managing the service.

SBC will test the system at a staging center in Memphis, Tennessee, and consultants from Callisma, an SBC company, will work with Ford to integrate the new system with the company's existing infrastructure, the statement said. Ford is already an SBC customer, using the carrier's Centrex centralized call switching service and the SBC GigaMAN Service, a point-to-point Ethernet network, among its facilities in south eastern Michigan. Ford has about 327,000 employees worldwide.

Huge VoIP roll-outs like this one are making the technology far more credible and will reassure CIOs thinking of a converged all-IP strategy. However, success will still depend on significant investment in support and partnerships, such as Ford's with SBC, so cost savings will certainly not be immediately visible.

Cisco's IP telephony platform has come under some fire lately and smaller competitors have been making hay from some defections from the giant, but the Ford deal puts the company back on top of the list of VoIP players.

Telcos and other IP providers will need to polish up their services offerings and ensure they can form true partnerships with large enterprises if they are to take advantage of the opportunities of IP convergence.

BOEING

Boeing is expanding its IP telephony roll-out to its entire enterprise and will standardize on Cisco IP telephony equipment. The deal with Cisco will extend IP telephony to all of Boeing's 150,000 employees in 48 states and 70 countries. It will also standardize on CallManager IP PBX technology, with several pilots running across its US enterprise--around 9,000 IP phones in total.

Boeing has worked with Cisco IP telephony gear since 2001, rolling out the technology in small pockets and a pilot involving about 800 staff to date. Previously, Boeing officials said that scaling problems on the CallManager servers were among some of the issues that held back a wider IP telephony roll-out.

"Recent advances in technology and product innovation have overcome many of the obstacles inhibiting the convergence of Boeing's voice and data networks," said Christopher Kent, vice president of computing and network operations in Boeing's Shared Services Group, in a statement.

Boeing already does extensive IP-based voice trunking over its MPLS-based IP backbone, which supports an array of mixed TDM phone switches from Avaya, Lucent and Nortel, as well as some Cisco CallManager IP PBXs. The Cisco deal will push IP telephony down to most desktops throughout the company. Boeing already uses Cisco switches and routers extensively in its enterprise Lans and corporate-wide wide area network. The company has said it will upgrade much of its current Lan gear to support the Cisco IP telephony technology and install QoS-capable switches at the Lan edge that also provide power over Ethernet.

The entire project will take roughly five to seven years from start to finish, at which point it will equip nearly all the 150,000 employees in 48 states and 70 countries.

Boeing's move to an IP-based phone network is being driven by cost savings. The company hopes to save millions of dollars each year in maintenance and management costs by converging its voice and data networks onto a single IP network. Because IP phones can be easily moved throughout the network, the company also expects to save a significant amount by reducing the cost it takes to add, move and change phones on the network.

Boeing's traditional telephone network has been built with a patchwork of gear from several companies, including Avaya, Lucent Technologies and Nortel Networks, as well as IP routers and switches from Cisco, but the company has not said whether it will adopt a multivendor sourcing policy for its IP telephony project.

BANK OF AMERICA

Bank of America has outlined plans for a corporate-wide IP telephony project encompassing about 180,000 phones, one for every employee over a period of the next three years.

The ambitious plan will involve replacing BoA's entire telecom infrastructure Cisco IP PBXs, voicemail servers and telephones. EDS will assist BofA in the deployment of the new phone network, which is expected to take three years to complete. This is Cisco's largest VoIP win to date in terms of user numbers.

The BofA network now consists of 362 PBXs based on TDM technology, which support 5,800 locations throughout the US. These PBXs, from various vendors, will be replaced with server-based Cisco CallManager IP PBXs. The call managers will be deployed in clusters in various BofA regional data centers to support all major offices, branches and other facilities over the bank's nationwide wide area network and regional metro area networks.

Cisco Unity unified messaging servers will also be deployed in data centers to consolidate all corporate voicemail boxes, which are spread across multiple systems. The bank will use Cisco IP telephony in its customer call centers, which will allow agents to have integrated voice/data applications. And the bank has deployed 12 multi-gigabit metro area rings in the major markets in which it operates. Recently, the bank finished building a private, nationwide optical network with backbone speeds up to 10Gbps and QoS services using MPLS technology.

The Bank of America deployment will occur in three phases during the next three years. The company is currently conducting a pilot program, which will conclude at the end of this year. The first phase of the production deployment will begin in early 2005, said Craig Hinkley, senior vice president of network architecture and strategic direction.

In total, the company plans to eliminate a disparate collection of 362 traditional telephone switches, with integrator EDS handling the transition.

CISCO

Cisco sold its first IP phone in 1999 and has now shipped around 3.5m, claiming to be replacing 8,000 traditional phones every working day. The company says it has 16,500 IP communications customers worldwide, 40 of which have already deployed more than 5,000 phones in their networks.

By August 2002, the company said it shipped 1m IP phones, and then it took one-third of the time, 12 months, to reach the 2m mark. In April 2004 its shipments increased to 3m IP phones overall.

But recently there has been speculation that Cisco is losing its market leading grip. Several Cisco VoIP customers have canceled contracts with their systems integrators recently. Merrill Lynch, one of the most high profile early adopters of IP telephony, as well as the state of Alaska, canceled their contracts with integrators that had recommended Cisco gear be used in their VoIP networks. Merrill Lynch is now deploying a mix of gear from Cisco and its competitor Avaya.