IP telephony is working its way into all types of enterprises, with the products and deployment plans varying as widely as the companies using the technology.

Latest news from the VoiceCon show

IT professionals attending VoiceCon this week hailed from large private enterprises, to public organizations and small businesses. While many at the show openly talked about their ambitious and innovative plans for IP telephony, many others said they came to learn the basic options for tying TDM PBXs into IP LANs and WANs.

One radical VoIP vision at the conference came from Johan Krebbers, group IT architect at Royal Dutch Shell, who discussed plans during a keynote session to migrate the oil company's worldwide voice network to Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 — a product not yet even shipping — along with Nortel VoIP gateways and phones.

From its three data centers in North American, Europe and Asia, the company plans to host all VoIP call control, messaging, collaboration and video for more than 130 sites worldwide. With this model, Shell hopes to simplify its voice and messaging management, expand its rich applications, and lower operating costs.

"We have many different PBXs out there," Krebbers said. "There is not centralized management for these systems … Five years ago, an office could have said we're not using Nortel or Alcatel or Siemens [but] that option is gone; it needs to be that way because a global company cannot afford to have a global infrastructure that is not the same."

Another large enterprise picking certain spots to deploy VoIP and messaging applications is Whirlpool. Instead of blanketing its offices and branches with VoIP, consumer appliance manufacturer Whirlpool is working the technology into its Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA); for example, SAP systems that manage production line processes, inventory, or quality control can initiate VoIP-based conference calls to groups of plant managers, or send text messages to inventory analysts, based on alerts or events that happen in SAP NetWeaver.

"We're trying to make data more action-oriented," said Brian Murphy, global IS development director for Whirlpool. A different kind of technologists than most of the VoiceCon crowd, Murphy's role in the company focuses more on applications and architecture than the company's telecom or networking operations.