How to roll out 180,000 VoIP phones

Craig Hinkley is in the thick of a 180,000 IP-phone rollout at Bank of America, which is replacing more than 460 PBXs with a centralized Cisco VoIP system that serves 6,000 U.S. branches and back office locations. Hinkley, named last year to our list of the Most Powerful People in Networking, took time out from flipping on the VoIP switch to give a project update to Network World Senior Editor Phil Hochmuth. The following is an edited transcript.

The bank announced plans to roll out VoIP in 2004. How is your deployment structured, and what stage are you at?

It's been going extremely well. In essence, what we've done is create three programs under our transformation umbrella: branch/retail, enterprise and call center. We've been moving at a steady pace on our retail branch deployment. We've [also] done a good number of enterprise locations this year. For our call center deployments, we're going to go into a pilot in the next four to five weeks before the end of the year. Then we'll be ramping that program up in 2007.

There are different scopes and capabilities in each of those major segments of our business. Our branch enterprise represents 6,000 stores we need to go and complete the transformation in. We focused on that first in order to make sure we get those numbers rolling.

How far along are you in that transformation?

In the branches, we have around 800 stores we've converted. In our enterprise deployment, we have around 50 enterprise locations we've completed today … enterprise locations are back-office type facilities. [More than 20,000 IP phones are deployed overall].