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A desire for cost savings on long-distant calls and infrastructure expenses is leading more and more companies to implement voice over IP (VOIP) technology, according to a report from Sage Research. In fact, over the last half of 2000, VOIP adoption rose from 5 percent to 19 percent among large enterprise organizations, and from 7 percent to 13 percent among small and midsized organizations.

High adoption will continue throughout 2001. By October 2001, more than half of large companies (those with more than 500 employees) will be using VOIP products or services, as will approximately half of small and midsized organizations (those with fewer than 500 employees).

Of those companies that haven’t yet adopted VOIP technology, most cite technological immaturity as the key obstacle. Sage points out that this hesitation bodes well for vendors, as more companies will be willing to adopt VOIP as the technology improves. Companies cite Cisco and Lucent as the vendors they’d most likely consider in shopping for VOIP product and services.

Custom-made for call centers

One of the most heavily trafficked operations of a company is the customer service call center. This is also one of the areas where companies stand to save the most money in terms of cutting long-distance phone call expenses.

Aspect Communications, which provides multichannel contact center solutions, aims to help you cut those costs with its Aspect IP Contact Suite, a group of IP-based contact center products. The IP Contact Suite lets businesses receive, track, and respond to all customer communications — whether voice or data — over one merged voice and data network, adding IP capabilities even if they don’t have an existing contact center.

Designed to give customers the same experience they get with traditional voice service, IP Contact Suite helps companies accomplish the following:

• Eliminate dedicated telephone lines for remote users and sites

• From one location, administer customer contacts across VOIP, fax, e-mail, Web chat, and browser share, thereby reducing the administration infrastructure

• Quickly launch new call centers without waiting for new phone lines to be set up

• Integrate other channels and have an existing infrastructure for next-generation applications such as personalized streaming video

Try this at home

There’s even technology to let you speak over the Internet at home. Cisco Systems has introduced a product that can VOIP-enable a traditional analog phone. Essentially a handset-to-Ethernet adapter, the Cisco Analog Telephone Adapter (Cisco ATA 186) connects a traditional phone to an IP telephony network. As a result, residential broadband customers can use any analog phone to make VOIP calls and take advantage of IP telephony-based services such as second line, Internet voicemail, unified messaging, and local presence numbers.

Cisco points out that customers using the Cisco ATA 186 will get the same voice quality they get from the public telephone network, but will save money on long-distance calls. And because the product can be deployed on existing infrastructures, service providers can start moving their customers to a converged network architecture quickly and cheaply.