* Overview of Comnet 2003’s VoIP session materials available at Webtorials
In the last newsletter we mentioned that the voice-over-IP sessions from Comnet 2003 are now available for general on-demand consumption. This time we’ll take a more detailed look at the abstracts for these sessions.
The first session, “The Successful Deployment of VoIP,” was presented by Jim Metzler of Ashton Metzler and Associates. In this session Jim asserts that VoIP has moved past the point where a small number of companies are trialing the technology to where it is a mainstream alternative for carrying voice traffic.
This session examined what is driving companies to deploy VoIP and what is inhibiting companies from deploying VoIP. Jim discussed voice design alternatives and detailed how to build a business case that identifies when deploying VoIP makes sense and when it does not make sense.
The second session, which Steve moderated, and which we have discussed in this column, was titled “New Enhancements in VoIP.” Steve was joined by panelists Craig Cotton of Cisco, Phil Hippensteel of Penn State Harrisburg, and Steve Davies of Ridgeway Systems.
In this session, the panelists noted that there’s no question that interest in VoIP has skyrocketed over the past year. Much of this increased interest stemmed from moving the discussion from the WAN and toll bypass to the LAN and increased productivity. The session examined the latest trends and products in the VoIP arena, what’s changed, and what’s stayed the same. Particular emphasis was given to E-911, connectivity, security and enhanced applications.
In the third session, Michael Marks from Concord Communications and Tom Dalrymple from Verizon discussed “Putting Reliability into VoIP Networks.” Service providers are eager to prove that VoIP can supply quality equal to that of the public switch telephone network (PSTN). Why? VoIP promises affordable rates to customers and economies of scale to service providers rolling out new voice and data services over a common infrastructure. But VoIP still has a credibility issue: Call quality suffers from a host of problems that raise questions about whether a truly converged network can reliably transport digital voice packets over the Internet.
Proactively monitoring call quality and troubleshooting problems before customers notice will help carriers restore customer confidence in the technology. In the presentation, Michael and Tom addressed real-world scenarios of successfully managing VoIP as part of a strategic managed service.
Finally, the fourth session, “VoIP, Voice Recognition and the Future of Customer Interactions,” featured Charlie Rabie from Aspect Communications. This session took the approach that today the best designed and run contact centers are taking a holistic approach to customer care through convergence, not just of networks, but also of applications.
Organizations are deploying a full stack of applications, from workforce management to VoIP and interactive voice response. VXML is the latest speech technology element of this converged approach. The end results for customers are greatly improved experiences, as they are served by one unified system rather than by several disparate silos; they will no longer have to give the same information over and over, first to self-service components and then to different live agents.
This VoIP track is available now at:
https://www.webtorials.com/main/comnet/cn2003/voice/index.htm
Other tracks will follow soon.
