SMB Partner E-Seminar

IP Telephony
 SMB Partner E-Seminar
IP Telephony

Introduction
Welcome to the Cisco E-seminar on IP Telephony. This seminar is designed to give
sales professionals an overview of the importance of IP Telephony, the technologies
involved and the benefits of selling Cisco’s IP Telephony solutions.

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Objectives
In this seminar, we will first look at the dynamics and trends in the industry, and
explain why IP Telephony has become such an important subject for organisations.

Next, we will discuss what the business needs that are addressed by IP Telephony.

We will then introduce Cisco AVVID, Cisco’s enterprise architecture that provides the
framework for today’s converged communications. AVVID provides the infrastructure
for combining business and technology strategies into one cohesive model.

Next, we will discuss a typical deployment scenario.

And finally, we will explain why selling Cisco’s IP Telephony is beneficial to both your
customers and your own company, as a Cisco reseller.

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Convergence: Key Drivers

Let us start with a look at the evolution of the market towards converged IP
Telephony solutions, and at some market research considerations and success stories.

The trend in the market is towards convergence; that is the bringing together of voice,
data and video onto a single network platform

If we take a recent survey from the META Group that asked businesses why they
would converge their network, we can define some clear drivers.

60% stated the major reason for converging networks was to reduce costs. Given the
current climate, this may appear a very sensible approach. The second clear driver was
to deploy new applications to improve employee productivity and customer care. And
thirdly, converged networks are expected to deliver increased revenues in the mid to
long term.

So when we consider what IP telephony brings to an organisation, we should always

keep in mind these two clear drivers – reduced costs through converged networks and
new applications that drive productivity and improved customer care.

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IP Telephony Market Growth

Convergence is happening at a fast pace. Research conducted by the Gartner Group
suggests that the total IP Telephony market has grown by 135 percent between 2000 and
2001. It also estimates that, by 2005, there will be more IP-based systems sold than
traditional PBX systems.

This means a rapid decline in PBX sales. This is no surprise as a Forrester Report showed
that global enterprises spend on average 16 million dollar on voice equipment each year,
with management being the largest part of this expenditure. In these circumstances, the
very significant savings to be made in the support and maintenance of IP Telephony are
compelling.

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IP Telephony Success
IP Telephony is now beginning to have a major impact in mainstream business
environments. To date, Cisco has shipped well over 1 million IP phones to over 5,000
customers worldwide. Cisco is market leader in IP Telephony in Europe, Middle East
and Africa with over 45% market share.

This is now a mainstream technology. At Cisco, all employees use IP telephony for
their daily business communications.

Throughout 2002, we have seen many small and medium companies converging their
networks to run IP Telephony in deployments from 20 phones to tens of thousands of
IP phones. For instance, Heinz has already around 3000 IP phones deployed and is in
the process of planning a pan-European rollout whilst mid sized businesses such as
Paul Smith have successfully deployed around 250 IP phones.

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EMEA Corporate Enterprise Telepony

The success of IP Telephony will depend on the ability of vendors to deliver the
solutions required by the customer. The Gartner Group undertook a very extensive
survey to see just how prepared the vendor market was to deliver enterprise telephony
systems. It should be noted that this survey is on the entire enterprise telephony
market, not just IP Telephony

Gartner looked at the market from two points of view: a vendor’s completeness of
vision and its ability to execute. Together, these give a clear indication of the
completeness of an individual vendor’s offering. The further into the right-hand top
quadrant a vendor is, the better their offering.

From this, it’s clear that Cisco is the leader in both completeness of vision and ability
to execute.

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Business Communication Challenges

Let’s now have a closer look at the business needs for IP Telephony.

Lets start by considering the main challenges that organisations are facing today.
Many organisations have developed separate communications systems that are
fragmented. This was adequate when communications occurred just via the telephone
or by mail. But now every organisation has multiple channels of interaction: telephony,
voicemail, email, Web as well as traditional methods of fax or face-to-face. Yet,
customers want excellent service regardless of how they interact with the organisation.

Within the enterprise itself, there are different departments from sales and marketing
to finance and support. There are often fragmented communications across these
departments that breed inefficiencies and increase costs.

Underpinning all this, we have multiple networks and multiple technologies to support
this plethora of communications channels and interactions. As any IT manager will
readily say, trying to integrate these different types of communications using different
technology platforms is a very difficult task.

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The Cisco AVVID Architecture

To help companies develop their converged communications strategy, Cisco developed
the Cisco AVVID architecture.

AVVID stands for Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data. It provides the
intelligent network infrastructure for today’s converged communications. As the
industry’s leading enterprise-wide, standards-based network architecture, Cisco AVVID
provides the infrastructure for combining your business and technology strategies into
one cohesive model.

Clients, such as IP phones, computers and fax machines communicate with Cisco’s
networking platforms, such as switches and routers. Cisco’s Intelligent Network Services
enable this network to run any type of voice, video or data application, as the network is
highly resilient, available and aware of the type of the traffic running over it. The result
is that voice quality is as good or better than traditional telephone systems.

Moving to the Internet Middleware layer, Cisco can provide CallManager, which enables
PBX-like functions to be delivered to a wide range of client devices such as IP Phones,
SoftPhones and wireless devices. In addition, advanced applications such as IP contact
centre, voice messaging, unified messaging and other productivity applications can be
delivered with the AVVID architecture.

AVVID enables these applications to be fully integrated in business processes and applied
by Internet Business Solutions such as Supply Chain Management, Customer Care and
E-Commerce.

In summary, AVVID is the unique end-to-end architecture enabling converged

communications.

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AVVID Voice solution Benefits

Voice solutions based on Cisco AVVID deliver proven return on investment and
competitive advantages to organisations.

Return on investment is realised through the benefits of consolidating multiple

networks into a single converged network. IP Telephony helps companies to reduce the
outlay cost when they add new sites. It also improves the efficiency of telecoms and
data departments, by helping them work together as a single team, to achieve short
and long term administrative savings. AVVID provides a highly scalable technology
platform to smoothly migrate from a traditional telephony environment. It scales
from a handful of users up to hundreds of thousands on the same IP Telephony
system.

Cisco IP Communications enable enterprises to migrate from traditional IP-based

communications at their own pace and thus deploy the applications they need when
they need them.

Improved productivity is delivered through access to a new range of productivity

applications, such as Unified Messaging, Softphones, Personal Assistants and IP
Contact centres. These applications increase employee efficiency and drive customer
service. Additionally, by using a common IP infrastructure and open standard
interfaces, innovative applications can be developed and rolled out very quickly.

A common enterprise infrastructure also gives employees ubiquitous access to voice,

data and video services anywhere they have access to the network. As a result, the
organisation becomes more agile in the way it reacts to changing business needs.

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Terminology
Let us now focus in on the IP Telephony architecture and explain it from a more
technical point of view. We will first define common terms used in this area of
communications.

One of the most common phrases used in this context is ‘Voice over IP’. It is the
generic term for the technology that turns voice traffic into IP packets. This technology
is the basis for transporting voice over an IP infrastructure. It is often used to describe
‘Toll Bypass’ – this is the ability to transport voice across private networks as a means
of avoiding the ‘per minute’ charging structure of public networks.

IP Telephony is more than Voice over IP or Toll Bypass. It is the provision of a full
end-to-end range of telephony services over an IP infrastructure. IP Telephony offers
the same sort of capability as traditional PBX systems but with far more flexible
deployment methods and additional functionality than previously possible.

Although Voice is carried across the network as IP packets, it has strict requirements
concerning "packet loss delay" and delay variation, to ensure that the voice
communication is of high quality.

The underlying network must deliver a guaranteed reliability and resilience, based
around Quality of Service and performance. It is the foundation for moving beyond
PBX-style voice applications to ‘business communications’ applications that drive user
productivity and customer satisfaction.

The lack of Quality of Service in the public Internet means that although it is possible
to make calls across the Internet using Voice over IP, there is no guarantee of voice
quality. As such, this is not a suitable business solution.

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Classic PBX Architecture

What does the architecture of traditional PBX phone systems look like?

Everything revolves around the Call Processing engine, that operates as the brains of
the systems. It provides key facilities, such as call routing, and advanced features like
call hold, call park, call pickup, conferencing and so on. Line cards link directly to
standard analogue or digital phones and trunk connections to the public or private
networks. The switching element interconnects the other 3 components.

In addition to providing all the end-user facilities, this basic architecture looks after
the network capabilities between multiple PBXs, and allows redundancy to be built
into the PBX system itself. It is a fairly resilient and functional system, but it does have
serious deficiencies.

Although scalable in its own way, this architecture poses major challenges when trying
to deploy solutions to different sizes of site – or when trying to create a single solution
that will work across a variety of sites.

Furthermore, it has been designed solely to handle voice traffic. So, as we move more
and more towards converged networks, its ability to integrate data and video with
voice becomes an impediment to a smooth migration of networks.

And there is a consequent network administration overhead, from having to operate

separate networks for voice and data and potentially video.

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IP Telephony Architecture
o So in what respect is an IP Telephony environment different?

o Although at first glance, this diagram looks similar to the PBX architecture, there is
one important key difference. In a distributed IP Telephony architecture, we take the
key components and deploy them on separate platforms. The separate system
components are linked via an IP network.

o Now, call processing has its own dedicated server. Trunk connections are made using
a voice-enabled router, often called a gateway, and the switching function is now
carried out by separate Ethernet LAN switches that connect directly to IP phones.

o The benefit of this approach comes not only from the extra power of having
dedicated servers for each part of the architecture. There is also the flexibility to
design an IP Telephony network with these components placed wherever required or
desired.

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IP Telephony Architecture
In other words, IP telephony removes the need for a single monolithic architecture that
has been imposed by traditional PBX systems.

Dedicated line cards are no longer required to connect IP phones, any LAN port or
any other intelligent voice devices like a PC SoftPhone will suffice. But, more
importantly, a complete PBX system is no longer needed at every site that needs to be
connected.

By separating the architecture components, we allow them to be distributed

throughout the network. For instance, call processing can be centralised at the head
office and gateways can be used to connect sites over either a private or public
network.

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Basic Building Blocks

Cisco Catalyst switches are key components of the AVVID infrastructure for voice.
Besides LAN switching, Catalyst switches provide a single integrated platform for
Quality-of-Service based Ethernet switching, IP routing and Voice gateway services.

This approach not only brings cost and administration benefits of integrating all this
within a single chassis to deploy data, voice and video throughout the organisation. It
also facilitates the enhanced reliability and Quality of Service, essential for converged
business communications.

In addition, inline power allows for the flexible deployment of IP phones around the
network, as power is delivered via the Ethernet jack, so phones do not require
individual power points to operate.

Voice-enabled routers have the capability to connect to both the IP WAN and the
public PSTN network. Not only does this provide for a Toll Bypass capability to
reduce call costs, it also builds availability by allowing for a seamless switch to PSTN
services if the IP WAN is in danger of reaching capacity

Chassis-based Catalyst switches also have the capability to act as gateways when fitted
with multi-service router cards.

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Cisco CallManager
Cisco CallManager provides the call processing in the IP telephony solution. The
application extends enterprise telephony features and capabilities to packet telephony
network devices, Voice over IP gateways and multimedia applications. This includes
call processing, call control and feature control. Advanced voice, data and video
services - such as multimedia conferencing, interactive contact centres – interact with
the IP telephony solution through the open telephony APIs of the Cisco CallManager.

Cisco CallManager can be deployed on Cisco provided servers or specific third party
servers from Compaq or IBM. It hosts the interfaces for integrating with third party
solutions. Its configuration is browser-based, which allows manageability from any
platform and location.

In addition, the CallManager ensures the network’s high scalability and availability.
This is accomplished by clustering a number of call processing servers together to
deliver a single call processing solution across the whole campus or network. The
capability of clustering multiple call-processing servers in an IP network is unique to
Cisco. Scalability up to 10,000 users per cluster is provided. By interlinking multiple
clusters, that figure rises to 100,000. Clustering aggregates the power of multiple,
distributed Cisco CallManagers, enhancing the scalability and accessibility of the
servers to phones, gateways and applications.

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Range of Cisco IP Phones

Cisco has a wide range of IP telephones covering everything from low-end solutions to
feature-rich solutions which offer more than just the normal telephone capability.

These communication devices are not simple replacements for traditional digital
handsets. A wide range of applications is emerging to add value to the IP phone.
Features like the PC-based SoftPhones, line and button expansion units and IP
conference phones are also available. Higher value applications are also beginning to
emerge. The move from the traditional handset to the IP phone is akin to the move
from the typewriter to the PC.

Most models of Cisco’s IP phone range support inline power that delivers the power
for the phone across the network cabling. This means it requires no changes to the
cabling and does not impact any data performance. Some of the phones also contain
Ethernet switch ports that allow a PC or similar device to be attached to the phone
itself, thus sharing the cabling and switch port within the network. In this case, one
wire to the desktop is sufficient, bringing significant cost savings.

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Converged IP Applications
One of the most significant benefits of a converged network is the range of
applications that can quickly and easily be deployed. These applications deliver
employees the tools they need to be more productive and to deliver improved service
to customers.

IP Telephony delivers much more than voice services; it opens the way to other
productivity enhancing applications. One example of this is Unified Messaging, which
allows you to access all message types – voice, fax, or email – from a single message
store and through a single interface. This is highly relevant for a mobile workforce
that now has simple access to all their messages while on the move.

Information Technology costs are also greatly reduced with Unified Messaging as the
IT department has a single system to buy, manage and maintain.

IP Telephony allows you to deliver customer contacts from phone, email or web to any
employee in your organisation enabling you to utilise the most appropriate answering
resource in every interaction.

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Deploying IP Telephony
So how can this communications architecture be applied in a small and medium
businesses network environment? Let’s have a look at a typical deployment scenario.

Let’s take the case of a company with multiple sites: the headquarters site, a regional
office, a branch office, and some telecommuters and home office workers. The head
office as well as the remote offices have their own local networks and are connected to
a company wide, private IP WAN. The telecommuters connect to the company
network with DSL.

All of these sites have, of course, voice communication requirements.

In this example, call processing and technology can be centralised at the headquarters,
instead of having telephony equipment at each site. Remote sites make use of this
functionality through voice-enabled routers, which are also connected to the PSTN for
external calls and for redundancy purposes.

Teleworkers connect to this IP Telephony network through, for instance DSL

connections. They can either connect directly into the company network or use a
VPN tunnel through the Internet.

The end result is one virtual system which gives employees complete mobility, by
enabling seamless access to voice, data and video services from anywhere.

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Why Cisco for IP Telephony?

Why is Cisco’s IP Telephony solution suited to the needs of small and medium
businesses? Let us have a look at the most important features and advantages and
explain what the key selling points are.

Cisco is recognised as the market leader in LAN, WAN and IP Telephony products.

All of these products are fully compatible with eachother and with the installed Cisco
base.

A converged solution brings many savings to companies with respect to single network
and productivity enhancing applications.

Cisco’s IP Telephony products are highly available, scalable and open platform. Thus,
the investment is protected for many years to come.

Cisco has further enhanced and complemented its own IP Telephony portfolio
applications, products and services from key ecosystem partners.

Finally, Cisco provides world-class services and support, to help companies

successfully implement their IP Telephony solutions.

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IP Telephone Opportunities
So where are the opportunities for you as a Cisco reseller to sell converge networks to
your customers? Let’s highlight four key areas that provide indicators as to when it is
the right time to move to IP Telephony.

First, when there is structural change within a company, there is a real opportunity to
assess existing solutions and identify where benefits can be gained. For example:
moving into a new building, major refurbishment work or a multi-site branch network
that needs consolidating.

Of course, end-of-life contracts on maintenance for existing PBX or Centrex systems

indicates a need to review the communications strategy. This is an ideal time to
evaluate the cost implications of convergence.

There are also clear productivity issues that open the door for convergence. For
instance, it may be required to virtualise or add multimedia functionality to a contact
centre or to utilise resources throughout the organisation that are not held centrally.

Finally, IP technologies can improve efficiencies. For instance, in certain vertical

environments that are not traditionally PC rich, Web-based content can be pushed to
the IP phone without the need to invest in costly PCs. And where facilities are
challenged, for example a high level of staff moves or a highly mobile workforce, IP
Telephony can actually reduce the amount of real estate needed.

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Why Sell IP Telephony?

For Cisco Resellers, selling IP Telephony Solutions will increase the value of the sale by
2 or 3 times or even more.

Selling IP Telephony will almost always require additional infrastructure products

sales.

It will enable you to become the convergent incumbent supplier for voice and data. As
such, it will strengthen your position in the account and differentiate yourself from
competitors

And, most importantly, it will reinforce your position as the trusted advisor to the
customer.

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