IP Telephony: Calling The Shots

The demands of the IP office environment grow more sophisticated every year, and VARs need better, more scalable, more feature-rich options for customers that want to embrace the money-saving and efficiency that a state-of-the-art IP telephony deployment can provide. Here's a look at some recent updates from vendors that appeal to VARs with an eye toward IP telephony success and vertical-specific deployments both hosted and non-hosted.

SMB-Centric: Avaya's IP Office Release 5 and Digium's Switchvox PBX

Avaya in September debuted a new version of IP Office, its primary unified communications offering for small and midsize businesses.

The update, IP Office Release 5, is software that can be customized to meet the needs of workplace roles such as a tele-worker or mobile worker, allowing VARs to more easily identify what applications are needed for which customers.

IP Office also supports up to 384 users using the IP Office 500 Server, which, according to Avaya, will now be its single hardware platform for IP Office, although Release 5 will work with existing 406v2 and 412 servers as well.

Avaya began rolling out IP Office Release 5 to channel partners in early August. Among several additional features, Release 5 uses productivity applications and a call reporting application, Customer Call Reporter, both accessible via a Web browser. It further offers support for third-party SIP phones, and in addition to the increased user capacity, conferencing capacity has doubled and now comes as two 64-party bridges.

Release 5 also has a business continuity hook for businesses that have multiple sites. It can use servers at alternate sites so that if one site goes down, the IP communications network will automatically come back up at another.

The goal, according to Avaya, was to give SMBs expanded options with their IP communications without having to do a massive upgrade.

"It enables business to do things faster and more efficiently, and that'll turn into profits," said Joe Scotto, director, small and medium business communications, at Avaya. "The No. 1 pain point was around keeping existing customers spending but also helping them reduce expenses."

"We had a regional bank that had IP Office, and they grew and were faced with going with an enterprise solution," said Bobby Stewart, president, enterprise networks, at CCI Telecom, a Statesville, N.C.-based solution provider. "But because of release 5, we can upgrade them for about a third of the price as an enterprise solution would be."

The move toward using Web applications to manage IP Office has been similarly appealing, Stewart said.

"If we go into Mac or Linux-only shops, we can deploy our apps and give them what they want. I have a bunch, plus my Windows desktop, and they're all running the same identical Avaya apps," he said. "That also frees up my technical staff. To us that's huge, very huge."

Open-source VoIP gear maker Digium's Switchvox IP PBX line -- a portfolio of VoIP phone systems -- is also designed with the needs of SMBs in mind, even getting down to the SOHO level with Switchvox SOHO.

Back in February, Digium updated the Switchvox IP PBXes with Switchvox SMB 4.0, which includes features such as Webaware unified communications (fax, video and chat), switchboard panel additions, call-queue enhancements, and a Windows desktop client called Switchvox Notifier that interacts with Microsoft Office applications for pop-up call notifications and histories and one-click options to add Outlook contacts and dial numbers.

For VARs, according to Digium's director of product marketing for Switchvox, Tristan Dugenhardt, the Switchvox enhancements offer a new way to add services by writing applications through the XML API. Solution providers can also offer clients an alternative to having a separate chat server and fax server by having both prebuilt into the appliance.

The updates also further a reseller's ability to create custom VoIP solutions for their clients. The addition of auto-configuration of Snom, along with its Polycom integration, also alleviates the need for VARs to manually configure customers' devices.

Dugenhardt said Switchvox SMB 4.0 is available for free to customers with a Switchvox SMB software subscription. For new customers, the software starts at $3,390 for a 10-user system, including hardware, software, a one-year subscription and warranty.