Lehman Bros. brings IP telephony development in house

Exploiting IP telephony technology is becoming more and more of a do-it-yourself project for brokerage firm Lehman Brothers.

Phil Palevo, who now manages Lehman's voice and data network engineering group, shared his company's experiences this week during a lunch presentation at the VoiceCon conference in Lake Buena Vista, Fla.

Lehman got its start with IP telephony back in 2000 and finished a 1,000-phone deployment in early 2001 at the World Trade Center. "But you all know how that went," he said, referring to the terrorist attack on New York later that year.

The deployment did help the company get a good understanding of IP telephony, including its role in disaster recovery, and now it has 15,000 IP phones deployed worldwide. Lehman is largely a Cisco shop, but integrates its IP telephony system with call center applications from Avaya, softphones from IP Blue and other vendors' offerings, Palevo said.

The first real IP telephony application brought up by the company, back in 2002, was for broadcasting information via IP phones to employees, such as where to go in case of emergency.  "People aren't always at their e-mail," he said.

Plenty of other applications were hitting the market as well, but complicated compatibility testing, drawn-out contracts and expensive maintenance contracts led Lehman to think about bringing IP telephony development in house. While the Cisco phones worked fine, Palevo said Cisco itself wasn't delivering many of the sorts of applications the financial firm needed. Palevo came across a vendor called Metreos while judging an IP telephony bake-off and decided to use the company's development environment to start building its own programs.

Among the applications that Lehman has rolled out or is deploying are VoiceTunnel, which provides secure remote access; a follow-me program with Web browser-based manageability; a password reset program;  a homegrown replacement for the off-the-shelf broadcast application; and a click-to-dial program that enables employees to call each other via the company's Web page. One new program requested by the company's equity research analysts speeds the process of sending urgent reports to customers and could save the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in labor costs, Palevo said.

In an interview following his talk, Palevo said that IP telephony application development is still a very small piece of the company's overall application development efforts and that he has just one developer and a few engineers to work on these projects. However, he said as ideas for more applications emerge, he'll look to get more resources.

Palevo said he is looking forward to exploiting the Session Initiation Protocol down the road; currently, the company's applications use protocols such as H.323 and Cisco's Skinny.