Managers sound off about telecom challenges

When Telemanagement called representatives of three telecom user groups last month, the journal aimed to uncover the hottest topics among communication technology professionals. But while UG activities were the focus of our conversations, talk eventually turned to individual telecom implementations - and we gained some excellent insights.Kathy Tarkington, telecommunications and user services manager at Atlanta law firm Arnall Golden Gregory LLP, Patti McDougall, telecom services manager at Edmonton-headquartered Voxcom Security Systems, and Jay Riekenberg, voice services manager at University of Texas at Austin, were candid about their user groups (associated with Cisco Systems Inc., Avaya Inc. and Nortel Networks, respectively). They were also candid about challenges in their own telecom environments. In question-and-answer format, this is what they had to say:Arnall Golden Gregory/CiscoTM: You are the user services manager at the law firm. How did you land the telecom portfolio?Tarkington: I got involved with our phone system because users were unhappy....One of the things they were used to on the old phone system was each secretary had the attorney lines on their phones, so if the attorney was on the phone and receiving another call, they (the secretaries) could look at the phone and see that they (the attorneys) are on the phone and that they (the secretaries) have to go ahead and get it. Or if the attorney wasn't there, it would ring on the attorney's line and then forward to the secretary's line. That's something we struggled with - getting an alternative in place on CallManager. But we were able to get around it, and they're happy with those features.TM: People were unsatisfied with the Cisco system at first?Tarkington: Part of it was just the fact that it was new. Part of it had to do with our implementation.TM: What would you have done differently to improve the implementation?Tarkington: Been involved at least a year before I got involved. Asked for the resumes of the people who were going to be implementing our system instead of looking at the overall resume of the company. That's as diplomatic as I can put it.Voxcom/AvayaTM: Why did Voxcom switch from TDM infrastructure to IP?McDougall: Every one of our branches was on a separate system for us to manage. If I made a change in Edmonton for programming I'd have to login to Sherwood Park to make the change as well. Our branches weren't even on Avaya. They were on turnkey systems. Part of our goal was to be able to have centralized administration, so if we made a change in Edmonton it would affect everybody, and everybody would be current, so if we had to evacuate Edmonton we could go to any site and have the system available to us.TM: Did Voxcom experience operational cost savings installing IP?McDougall: We did. Our long-distance costs went down because we no longer had to call long distance to the branches. We were able to do four-digit dialing. We've seen an increase in features out to the branches that perhaps we wouldn't have seen before.TM: Can you provide an example of those new features?McDougall: Probably the biggest ones are conference transferability, employee directories pushed out to all locations. We've been able to build our own internal conference bridges, instead of having to pay a third party vendor to use their on-demand bridges, so we've seen some cost savings that way. We have the ability for our branch managers' desk phones and cellphones or BlackBerries to ring simultaneously so we can reach them wherever we need to. And now that we're all on the same platform, we can push out technologies that otherwise only resided at our head office. For example, we have the ability to push out our CTI applications - click-to-dial, screen pops, auto-dial through the CRM application. Before it was all siloed in Edmonton. We were excited about the technology we had there, but we had no way to extend that to everybody else.UT Austin/NortelTM: You said some user group members, including UT Austin, are IP-enabling their large Nortel TDM switches. What's the benefit for the school?Riekenberg: My host switch is in a 55-year-old building that is on prime academic real estate. I'm going to have to move. I don't know when, I don't know where we're going to have to move to. They want the real estate I'm on for an academic building....We looked at what it would have taken to do some kind of redundant front-end in TDM.... It would have been very difficult, and you would have had to do the architecture up front. Well, it wasn't built that way. If you look at a traditional TDM switch, there are three chunks to it: there's intelligence, a network and interfaces. If you look at an IP-based switch, you have intelligence - the server - an IP network, and line or trunk interfaces called gateways. The functions are analogous. When they built TDM switches they put all that stuff in cabinets in the same place. As soon as you say, "I'm going split these pieces apart," you pick up a tremendous amount of flexibility to distribute the pieces. They don't have to be sitting in the same place.TM: I see. IP supports a distributed, flexible architecture and that should make moving the telecom equipment easier. So, when you move, will you cut off the old chassis and continue all IP?Riekenberg: I honestly don't know the answer to that. It's too soon. It comes back to the fact that I have a campus with 180-plus buildings on it, and I have copper going to those buildings. The pitch has always been, "OK, if you want my real estate, this is what it's going to cost you: I need access to the manholes around the building, and I need some place to put my switch gear within 500 to 1,000 feet of that so I can re-route at least a portion of the copper service."What we think is going to happen is there's going to be a place for TDM in buildings for emergency telephones, machine room telephones and elevator telephones, for a long time. We don't think we're going to be able to make the data network affordably robust enough to support that kind of life-safety, critical service as cheaply as we can do it with some kind of legacy TDM service.TM: What other things affect your decisions?Riekenberg: I'm beginning to get a ubiquitous 802.11 network. Do I want to move some telephony over there? Do I have enough mobile users to make it worthwhile? My personal opinion is when I can get spend $50 and get a dual-mode device to put in my pocket, instead of it costing $300 or $400, then there might be some good things that could happen there.TM: So many changes, it's almost paralyzing, isn't it? Riekenberg: Well, you gotta do something.

Managers sound off about telecom challenges

News | April 1, 2007

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