Cisco Services will build underlying infrastructure
British Telecom and Cisco are partnering to deliver hosted IP Telephony. The offering is based on BT’s Onevoice UCC portfolio and 21CN global platform. Cisco Services will build the underlying infrastructure. Until recently, Nemertes found limited interest in hosted VOIP with fewer than 18% of organizations using or evaluating a hosted solution, partly do in part to provider’s limited geographical coverage. Recent feed back from IT practitioners indicate increasing interest in a “pay as you go” model for UC applications, including IPT. They hope to leverage the benefits of UC without the upfront capital investment. Driving the move towards UC is the fact that workers are increasingly distributed, conducting business from branch locations, home offices and partner sites. These virtual workers rely on UC applications as a way to easily share information, communicate and interact. IT decision makers having trouble creating a compelling business case for on-premise IPT deployment should evaluate hosted solutions both for short term cost savings and as a long term strategy.
