Deutsche Bank saw VoIP in its future when it acquired Berkshire Mortgage and is now taking it worldwide.
For global financial giant Deutsche Bank, the road to a 20,000-user VoIP network begins with 1,000 small steps. But the bank’s view on the future of IP telephony in the company is clear.
“IP telephony is not going away,” says Reiner Bayard, managing director and global head of networks at Deutsche Bank. “The trend is irreversible for us. So the question is, what is the right time to jump on the bandwagon?”
The right time to jump presented itself recently when Deutsche Bank acquired Berkshire Mortgage, with around 10 sites in the U.S. and some 1,000 employees. The sites, all recently upgraded with new Cisco LAN and WAN gear, are located in the Midwest and West coast. Each site has around 100 end-users. The Cisco IP phones being deployed will connect to redundant, SIP-based CallManager 5.0 servers in the bank’s New Jersey data center facilities via T-1 links.
“Survivability in the branch offices was of course a big topic when centralizing the CallManagers in the data center,” Bayard says. The remote sites will use Cisco’s Survivable Remote Site Telephony (SRST) technology, built into the WAN routers, which allows for PSTN calls and telephony feature support if the T-1 network has a problem.
British Telecom is managing the deployment of the phones and CallManagers, as well as the WAN services connecting the branches. The carrier’s professional services group is also responsible for managing the IP PBX servers and other VoIP equipment; secure links into Deutsche Bank’s New Jersey data centers will be used for this to manage and configure the Cisco servers.
Bayard expects to see some productivity gains and modest cost savings from the U.S. deployment. “Right now, with 1,000 [IP phone] positions, we won’t really see any significant cost savings” in terms of administration of the system. “But down the road, with the potential for 15,000 to 20,000 ports, we could see significant cost savings,” he adds.
In the future, as IP telephony spreads across the global firm, the payoff for administrative cost-savings could be huge. And the promises of integrated voice, video and business applications are enticing. The soft-savings of IP telephony are in productivity gains that CallManager’s SIP-based features can offer.
“We expect that mobility will help us, as well as presence, especially in offices where people change workplaces,” Bayard says. “There will probably be more applications around IP telephony that will increase productivity in the future; we’re interested in providing a full desktop that provides messaging, telephony and video to [employees]. Are we there right now? No but this is the beginning of the deployment of the technology.”
The fact that CallManager 5.0 can run SIP was a factor in the bank’s decision to go with the Cisco IP PBX platform, Bayard says.
“We are a very international company,” with around 2,500 locations worldwide he says. “When we think of the future integration of systems in the bank, it is a concern for us to have a standards-based platform.”
The fact that Cisco, and many other vendors that support SIP in IP PBX equipment, but also rely on proprietary SIP extensions for certain features, is also a concern, he adds.
“I think the industry is still pretty fragmented in the area [of SIP interoperability]. We’ll have to see how that plays out. The question is, is the SIP from vendor No. 1 the same as SIP from vendor No. 2? And how much do they rely on proprietary technology?”
Bayard says it was important to take the long-view on IP telephony when picking a phone system for the acquired Berkshire offices. He says that when the IT group priced IP systems last year, the cost of acquisition, maintenance and support was around 20% lower than the offers he saw from TDM phone vendors.
“Now that number has eroded really,” he says. “If I and go and do a deal right now, I could get TDM technology cheaper than IP technology. But the business case over three to five years would not be beneficial … and how much do you want to invest in old technology?”
Where Deutsche Bank goes next with VoIP, and which vendor will be used remains to be seen. Telephony inside the bank is still a smorgasbord of vendors, from Cisco in the branches, to Nortel in its major U.S. offices and Siemens in its European locations, and some “Avaya sprinkled in the U.S. and in Asia,” Bayard says.
“We haven’t really made up our mind on the global strategy yet,” for IP telephony he says. “There are a number of decisions coming up in that. I’m not necessarily convinced that a one-vendor strategy is the way to do it. It all depends on the individual cases.”
He says consolidation of IP telephony with one vendor would be helpful for management and procurement purposes, but having multiple vendors — especially for different regions around the world — could be easier for support purposes, as well as end-users’ familiarity with certain brands. What will be most important to the bank going forward is what kind of IP telephony offerings service providers can give them, since so much of the bank’s telephony management is outsourced.
“We need to look at how the technology strategy and service strategy fit together,” he says. “We try to consolidate as much as possible, but it’s not always the case.”
