* Big VoIP deals are all the rage
Big VoIP deals seem all the rage of late.
Bank of America (BoA) announced plans to standardize on Cisco IP phones across the entire company, with an eventual 180,000 IP phones running worldwide. Last month, Ford and SBC announced plans to install 50,000 IP phones in the car maker’s U.S. offices and plants. And in July, Boeing said it would install 150,000 IP phones thought the company worldwide.
And Industry experts say that the IP PBX and phone technology is ready for mass deployment, after years of doubts about the technology’s ability to scale and provide 99.999% uptime – the tenet for system reliability among corporate telecom executives.
Clearly, support for larger IP telephony rollouts is mounting; the number of IP phones planned among just Ford, Boeing and BoA represent about a quarter of all IP phones shipped last year, according to IDC. The research firm says the installed base for enterprise VoIP gear will grow dramatically over the next several years. Around 200,000 IP PBXs are installed in organizations now; 1.4 million IP PBXs expected to be running in production by 2008. Meanwhile, worldwide IP PBX revenue will double from $2.6 billion this year to an anticipated $6 billion over the same time period.
The large IP deployment plans that are coming out now signal that IP PBXs have finally overcome scalability and reliability issues that had dogged the technology for years.
Our Special Focus this week takes a look at the trend and talks to a few users about their experiences. For more see: https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2004/100404specialfocus.html
