VoiceCon 2004 Keynote: Moving Enterprise Telephony to Next Plateau

Although leading edge corporate users have been testing IP telephony implementations for five years, the real market will be about delivering productivity gains to mainstream users, said Don Peterson, CEO of Avaya, speaking at VoiceCon 2004 in Orlando, Florida. Peterson observed that while overall employment levels have fallen in recent years, impacting sales of corporate PBXs, a growth in productivity that has nevertheless ensued. This growth in productivity, he contends, is driven by streamlined business models and enabled by integrated voice/data communications. He said that while the "hard dollar" savings from a consolidated voice/data corporate network are substantial, the "soft dollar" improvements in business applications enhanced by IP telephony are essential to making the business case for large enterprise to migrate their voice networks.

Moving call centers to India or other low-cost locations is another driving factor for IP telephony, one which Peterson said "the industry speaks softly about but everyone knows there's a stampede underway." He gave the example of EDS, which is moving the jobs of some of its 15,000 call center employees to India.

Peterson estimates there are over 400 million installed corporate TDM voice lines and the transition to hybrid-IP solutions or pure-IP solutions would be a long one. He affirmed Avaya's commitment to the open systems model and noted a number of strategic partnerships with company's such as Motorola, Proxim, Polycom and Extreme Networks. Peterson also claimed that Avaya has made significant gains in market share for IP telephony line ship, especially in the most recent fiscal quarter. http://www.convergedigest.com