Users discuss big VoIP rollout risks and rewards

Enterprise telecom managers in the thick of some of the biggest VoIP rollouts in the industry spoke of the challenges and — hopefully, they say — bottom-line benefits of converged voice/data infrastructure during a panel at the Voice on the Net show in Boston this week.

“Keeping sane is very hard sometimes,” said Todd Goodyear, vice president and manager of voice product development at Merrill Lynch, which is in the midst of rolling out 35,000 Cisco IP phones to 600 Merrill Lynch branch offices nationwide.

The company worldwide uses a mix of digital and IP voice gear from Avaya, Nortel and Cisco and is deploying Cisco IP phones in its remote offices. This will allow financial advisors to be tied together with a company-wide call routing system, providing employees in branch offices with quicker access to customer data, as if they were in a centralized call center. Goodyear said the push of converged voice/data applications to branch offices is expected to drive revenue, making remote staff more productive and able to handle more customer contacts.

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Enterprise telecom managers in the thick of some of the biggest VoIP rollouts in the industry spoke of the challenges and — hopefully, they say — bottom-line benefits of converged voice/data infrastructure during a panel at the Voice on the Net show in Boston this week.

“Keeping sane is very hard sometimes,” said Todd Goodyear, vice president and manager of voice product development at Merrill Lynch, which is in the midst of rolling out 35,000 Cisco IP phones to 600 Merrill Lynch branch offices nationwide.

The company worldwide uses a mix of digital and IP voice gear from Avaya, Nortel and Cisco and is deploying Cisco IP phones in its remote offices. This will allow financial advisors to be tied together with a company-wide call routing system, providing employees in branch offices with quicker access to customer data, as if they were in a centralized call center. Goodyear said the push of converged voice/data applications to branch offices is expected to drive revenue, making remote staff more productive and able to handle more customer contacts.

Merrill Lynch also expects to improve call availability and save on costs by collapsing call processing from individual key telephone and PBX systems in branches to a set of centralized, redundant data centers, where clusters of Cisco CallManager servers will provide call control and application features for end users.

“Our data centers have the feeds and speeds that are appropriate” to host centralized call processing, Goodyear said. “The environment is highly redundant and has 24-by-7 management operations.”

One of the major challenges in deploying thousands of new IP phones involved taking inventory of Merrill Lynch’s current telecom infrastructure before converting to IP.

“Taking inventory is key,” Goodyear said. When the firm began planning its VoIP project in the branches, he said, “we weren’t sure what we had out there … and what we didn’t know was killing us.”

An initial projection by the company found that there were approximately 1.2 phones for every Merrill Lynch employee; it was later discovered that the figure was closer to 2.2 phones per worker. “There are some challenges to work though,” he said. The company currently has about 8,000 IP phones deployed, out of 65,000 total employees. Goodyear expects to quadruple that number a year from now.

The issue of taking inventory of traditional telecom usage was also an important process for Allstate Insurance, which is using VoIP to consolidate disparate call center sites, as well as tying together branch offices with IP phones.

“I can’t state enough how important it is to have an accurate inventory of your critical circuits,” said Bruce Senneke, a procurement specialist at the insurance giant, who works with the firms’ engineers and network architects on buying VoIP gear. Gauging the company’s current call center voice usage — 30 million minutes per month across 14 call centers — was a key part in figuring out what the company’s needs will be in terms of VoIP bandwidth.