Is It Time for IP Telephony
The assumed savings have been borne out: Brody says the district has reduced monthly charges from its phone provider, Sprint, to $3 per phone from $14. Plus, the district is increasing its phones to 27,000 from 9,000, with most of the new units going into classrooms for teachers to use.The other big area of savings, according to Brody, is in support. The district's staff of 12 field technicians can service three times as many phones because most management tasks, such as reassigning phone extensions to teachers, can now be handled remotely: "We don't have to send someone out in a van to the school as much as we did previously," he says. Brody estimates total annual savings on communications and labor costs at $1 million to $2 million per year.
Analysts say there's no single "killer application" for IP telephony akin to the spreadsheets and word processors that drove the adoption of personal computers in the 1980s. But industry watchers expect new voice applications—tailored to specific industries—to start taking on more starring roles. Wynn Las Vegas, the sprawling 2,700-room luxury hotel and resort that opened earlier this year, is using 4,000 Avaya color-screen phones across its property to act as information kiosks for guests. For example, the phones let guests browse events scheduled at the resort, then press a button to connect to a ticket agent and book a reservation. Other companies have used Internet-protocol telephony to improve business process efficiencies—sometimes in ways they didn't anticipate.
Two years ago JCB, a farm equipment manufacturer with U.S. operations based near Savannah, Ga., picked an IP telephone system from Mitel Networks mainly because it just needed a new phone switch; the company had hit the maximum 200-line capacity on its old Lucent Technologies system. Only later did Paul Limon, JCB's U.S. manager of information systems, discover that the phone switch could easily pass Caller ID information for calls coming in to a customer-service number to the company's SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning system. more >>>