Convergence 101
A Partner’s Primer on Selling VoIP Services to SMBs

By Ed Higgins and Ron Davis

Early solutions for routing voice traffic over a packet data network, such as IP, frame relay or ATM fell far short of their promise. Users could not count on getting a dial tone 99 percent of the time and conversations were interrupted by delays, echoes, frequency clipping and missing words or phrases.

Today, there is a more compelling story to be told. Service providers and equipment manufacturers have solved two of the greatest problems plaguing VoIP: availability and performance. Data networks carrying packetized voice traffic consistently are delivering up to 99.999 percent availability, and service and equipment providers have dramatically increased performance by minimizing or eliminating packet loss, jitter and delay. Today’s VoIP product and service solutions are greatly improved and gaining in popularity.

Companies eager to implement VoIP solutions typically have been large businesses with call centers that generate heavy volumes of long distance and that require large hardware investments and support staff. In most cases, these companies can earn a return on investment on an end-to-end voice over packet solution.

For telecom agents and VARs, the question remains how to leverage voice-over-packet technology to provide small and medium-sized business customers similar cost savings or feature benefits over traditional voice transport and switching. If you can answer this question, you are on your way to increasing your core service sales, adding new revenue streams to your business and increasing the value you provide to your customers. If not, then you need a quick primer on positioning convergence and a few targeted entry points that will help identify your customer’s business need for voice over packet and allow you to sell more products and services.

POSITIONING VOIP

How do you position convergence and VoIP to your customer? Here is your sales mantra: I can save customers money by reducing their cost and overhead of two separate networks, and make them money by increasing their productivity through new communication capabilities.

The term “convergence” refers specifically to the integration of voice and video solutions onto a single data network — often performed using IP, thus voice over IP solutions are formed. Given the complexity and possible unreliability of a data network, why would anyone want to move their reliable business-critical phone service to it? The answer is in the promise — lower long-distance costs, lower equipment costs and related maintenance and administration and new productivity-enhancing applications.

Delivering on this value proposition does not require replacing a customer’s PBX investment with a full-blown VoIP solution. There are migratory VoIP solutions that provide tangible benefits to SMBs without requiring a complete network overhaul.

The first, and most common area of examination in order to justify a move to VoIP, is in lowering long-distance costs. Even with today’s low cost national long distance, VoIP solutions may offer a reduction in costs for SMBs. Many businesses incur long-distance costs for international calls and inter-company site-to-site calls. A number of businesses also have satellite offices with disparate PBXs and remote users with their own long-distance services. These present excellent opportunities for justifying VoIP solutions that don’t require large investments in new PBXs and IP phones.

Value Proposition No. 1. Here is a question you should ask an SMB with a single site or with a small number of remote offices that may not be utilizing VoIP: Would you be interested in exploring how to lower your long-distance spending by leveraging your existing Internet access? This should get the customer’s attention, but now you have to deliver. Here’s how: VoIP can be implemented in a single-site scenario to lower long-distance costs by utilizing existing Internet access for primary outbound longdistance services (see diagram ).

A VoIP solution can be provided by connecting the customer’s existing PBX (via T1 or PRI connection) to a router capable of packetizing the voice traffic and implementing quality of service (QoS) parameters. This packetized long-distance traffic would then traverse the Internet instead of the telephone network for the majority of its round trip. Carrier-provided gateways between the Internet and the PSTN will allow calls to be routed back into the PSTN and reach anywhere in the world. In this scenario, only the customer’s primary outbound long distance is routed over the Internet.

Some level of backup long-distance connectivity is normally maintained, but at a much lower cost. This solution does not require IPenabling the PBX and supports customers with multiple locations, allowing them to use the Internet for site-to-site calling at all VoIP enabled locations. This is a great win-back strategy to allow you to sell your local voice and Internet access services combined with VoIP to unseat an incumbent carrier.

Value Proposition No. 2. Here is a question you should ask an SMB with a data network connecting geographically disbursed locations and a single centrally located PBX: Would you be interested in looking at VoX (voice over “X” where X equals IP, ATM, frame relay, etc.) solutions that can reduce your interoffice calling and IT costs? VoX solutions can deliver inexpensive interoffice calling by extending the features of a single PBX to remote offices and users (see diagram).

This functionality is achieved by adding off-premise extensions (OPXs) capability to the data network. Private line automatic ring down (PLAR) is a technology that will allow a customer to supply small remote offices and users connectivity to a centrally located PBX via existing data circuits. The PBX supplies dial tone for the remote locations and interoffice calling occurs as if the remote sites were colocated with users directly connected to the PBX. This provides a customer an inexpensive way to achieve low-cost interoffice and centralized long-distance calling without incurring PBX equipment, maintenance and administration costs at each location.

Value Proposition No. 3. Another application of VoIP is to achieve toll bypass utilizing an existing private network infrastructure to transport high call volumes between geographically dispersed inter-company locations. Toll bypass eliminates the private line charges traditionally incurred through the use of dedicated voice circuits between PBXs. For example, users at a site in Los Angeles would access their local PBX, then dial a set of digits that would enable them to access the corporate PBX in New York via a private circuit. A local call could then be placed to a destination in New York from the corporate PBX even though the caller is in Los Angeles. VoX allows a company to utilize their data network to provide the same type of connectivity either between PBXs or even from remote phones to PBXs (see PLAR above).

Some service providers now offer services that allow a company’s home office user to benefit from toll bypass. For instance, private DSL services utilizing the appropriate routing and telephone equipment can allow a home user to access their internal voice network for long-distance and intra-office calling. This technology can be used by businesses as small as the one-site corporation with home users to very large corporations.

Value Proposition No. 4. Here is a question for multisite customers with existing legacy PBX equipment that do not want to make an investment in new hardware but are interested in VoX: What if a VoX solution could extend the ROI of your existing PBX and reduce costs of dedicated voice lines?

This solution involves IP-enabling or upgrading the legacy PBX to support IP. It is difficult to observe the marketplace today and find a new PBX without some form of IP capability (or the ability to upgrade to IP); however, certain legacy PBX models did not ship with this functionality. There are many cases though where an IP upgrade is available and can extend the life of a customer’s legacy PBX. Implementing IP on an existing PBX will allow a customer to gain the benefits of converging voice and data lines onto an existing data network with minimal investment.

Some basic connectivity from the PBX to the PSTN can be maintained or the customer can utilize VoIP gateways to interface with the PSTN. Certain PBX models even will verify the integrity of the IP network prior to routing a call. If the integrity is not sufficient, the call can be routed over the traditional voice network.

IP enabling a PBX normally requires a software upgrade and the appropriate hardware interface to the data network. One advantage of this solution over an end-to-end VoIP solution is bypassing the need to replace existing telephones with IP phones. Additional advantages for the customer include not having to train the end-users to use the new phones and features nor the IT staff on how to support these new features. This option can allow the customer to implement VoIP at a pace that fits their level of comfort.

PROFITING FROM VOIP

Aside from short-term cost savings, the second area of VoIP justification could be through long-term cost savings and increasing productivity. In the long term, moving to a single IPbased network makes sense. A business can consolidate expenditures and support resources for both voice and data networks onto single IP-based network with fully integrated VoIP usage. IP phones use legacy LAN cabling to make calls and reduce the need for additional analog or digital phone line drops in new facilities. IP phones also reduce the administration overhead by allowing a user to take their phone and extension with them as they move within an office or to new locations. New IP soft phones allow for computer-based calling and may possibly eliminate the need to purchase separate phone equipment altogether. Soft phones also hold much promise for the mobile or remote user allowing them to take their extension with them and send all their calling through high-speed connections from anywhere in the world.

VARs selling VoIP solutions generally provide some of the network integration services that are critical to ensuring proper functionality of VoIP. They ease the pain felt during the migration process and perhaps even support the technology once it is implemented. If you are an agent that provides these services, then it may be in your best interest to try and sell end-to-end VoIP solutions at every opportunity and then work your way back into one of the above scenarios.

Before you recommend a customer move to full-blown VoIP solutions with IP PBX equipment, you need to get them to make the same mission-critical commitments to the IP network infrastructure that they would to the former phone system. With proper planning for redundancy, power backup, performance (e.g., QoS and throughput), an IP PBX can achieve the same level of reliability and availability as the traditional PBX.

Customers also will be looking to savvy VARs and agents to help them assess their long-distance usage, network infrastructure and VoIP solutions to determine compatibility and capacity requirements. Agents with strong voice backgrounds will excel here but may need to increase their proficiencies when it comes to the IP network. Most IP networks are best-effort configurations, and agents with strong data skills can be an invaluable resource to help them increase reliability and eliminate bottlenecks. This poses a great opportunity for the agent to offer professional consulting services, router upgrades and other ancillary equipment, and provide the customer training services on the new technology.

Those agents not offering support and migration services and related staff should look at offering managed VoIP solutions provided by many leading service providers. Managed solutions provide the staff and support to implement, migrate and manage VoX solutions down to the desktop.

Also, remember that VoIP is susceptible to the same security threats as the data network. Customers will be looking to you to provide the security required to ensure that worms, viruses, denial of service attacks, and hackers looking to make free phone calls don’t lower the availability or reliability of the system.

Offering security services either directly or through a partner will help you gain a larger share of wallet otherwise this is another reason to recommend managed VoIP solutions from your service provider.

No matter the size of the customer, migrating to a VoIP solution delivers short- and longterm cost savings and improved productivity. Agents and VARs gain the ability to sell a solution that encompasses hardware, software, access, transport and even professional services in a single solution sale. At the very least, you VoIP provides a great reason to assess a customer’s voice, data and infrastructure and gain vital insight into their true business needs. Once a customer takes the step into converged networking you have the opportunity to help them implement new applications that can dramatically lower their IT costs and increase productivity.