Last week, we highlighted an Avaya announcement about the company’s new IP Telephony (IPT) system called Avaya Distributed Office, designed to meet the challenges of smaller offices that are part of a larger enterprise. Although we reported that the Avaya Distributed Office can well-serve the SMB office with single-office configurations available for 40 and 120 users, Avaya suggested in a follow-up briefing that the real strength of their SIP-based system architecture is to link many hundreds or even thousands of small offices together as part of a larger enterprise configuration.

So we’d like to dig deeper and outline both the similarities and differences between a stand-alone SMB location and the remote branch office—with a focus on how IPT system requirements for the SMB and the branch location can simultaneously be alike and different. Today, we’d like to highlight the similarities.

When considering a move to a premise-based VoIP system, both the SMB and the branch office need a solution that offers affordability, usability, and manageability. Technical support in the office is typically limited; an SMB usually can’t support a large IT staff while the large enterprise usually centralizes IT support and network management. Consequently, onsite configuration and management needs to be simplified for both.

A user-friendly experience is also important in both environments, so intuitive user controls for both the phone and any unified communications feature need to be offered in a way that doesn’t require hours or days of training. For example, if an office worker has come to rely on key system features on their existing phone or a Microsoft application for their e-mail and calendaring, then support for these features on an IPT system facilitates user comfort levels with a new system.

Next time—how IPT requirements for the SMB office and branch office are different.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.