Highlights
- Deploy a complete IP telephony suite on one easy-to-manage system—or even part of a system shared with other applications
- Integrate your voice, collaboration and business applications to unify communications, streamline business processes and boost customer satisfaction and loyalty
- Connect co-workers, suppliers, partners and customers to improve productivity and collaboration
- Lower your traditional telephony costs while enhancing the way you do business for increased competitive advantage
- Extend the IBM® System i™ benefits of simplicity, reliability, integration, vertical growth and security to IP telephony
i want to communicate when, where and how i want
i want control. i want an i
In today’s highly competitive business environment, companies everywhere want to extract business advantage from every technology in the enterprise. IP telephony is of great interest because adopting the right solutions for this technology can produce both cost savings and significant business benefits inside the company and with partners, suppliers and customers.
What is IP telephony? Simply stated, it is technology that sends voice communication over your data network using Internet Protocol (IP). This is in contrast to traditional phone systems where data and voice networks were totally separate. IBM System i IP Telephony solutions are designed for business where quality and reliability requirements are higher than consumer-oriented Voice over IP (VoIP) services that use the Internet for IP routing. By carefully designing and testing IP telephony solutions over networks that deliver high Quality of Service (QoS), call clarity and reliability can be superior to traditional phone service.
More companies of all sizes are replacing their traditional phone systems with IP telephony to reduce costs. Savings can be realized by reducing infrastructure and operating costs because IP telephony systems share a single infrastructure across multiple offices for voice and data, and these systems are easier to manage and change with the needs of the business. In addition, companies can automate administrative tasks, such as “moves, adds, and changes,” and may experience lower charges for long-distance calling and conference-call hosting.
A subset of these organizations is moving beyond cost savings to realize the full potential of IP telephony by extending the capabilities of telephony to collaboration and business applications to deliver business advantages around increased productivity, streamlined business processes and increased customer satisfaction.
As businesses expand, worker mobility increases, and travel budgets tighten, comprehensive and integrated collaboration tools become increasingly important. Effective communication is an essential part of modern business, but users frequently are frustrated while juggling multiple devices to handle phone, fax, e-mail, IM, and Web-based communications with fragmented or incomplete contact data. Workers need integrated communications tools combining ease-of-use with the ability to choose the medium appropriate to the task at hand. By integrating voice capabilities into your current collaboration applications, such as e-mail and instant messaging, you can help your employees to be more productive, responsive, and accessible. Examples of this integration include having access to all your phone, fax and electronic messages in a single unified in-box, or setting up a team call by simply clicking names on an instant message buddy list.
At the same time that companies rely on a communication infrastructure to increase collaboration, they invest heavily in processes developed around ERP, CRM and other mission-critical applications to drive their core business. Unfortunately, most of these applications run in isolation from the collaboration infrastructure that connects the employees, customers, and partners that use them. These applications can, almost without exception, be enhanced through integration with communications applications.
For example:
- A supply chain application that automatically calls the recipient when a crucial shipment is about to be delivered;
- A CRM application that displays a customer record when a customer calls;
- A call center management tool that routes calls based on the expertise of the representative;
- An ERP application that allows users to check inventories via voice.
By integrating business applications with voice, you can streamline operations, improve accuracy and responsiveness to customers, and make vital information accessible when employees are away from the office. Enhancing business applications with voice can drive more efficiency as the right person is provided with the right information at the right time.
The past few years have brought an explosion of applications and communication tools promising to improve productivity. However, many businesses have experienced diminished productivity because of the time required to manage these disparate tools and bring all the information together. This disaggregation is about to change as the telephone integrates with the computer in a fundamentally different way.
Many companies, such as yours, likely upgraded their telephony private branch exchanges (PBXs) around 1999 in anticipation of Y2K. As these systems reach their end of life, they will not be replaced but, rather, be made obsolete as the PBX becomes a piece of software running on a server—equally accessible to office workers via their phones, as well as collaboration and business applications via Web Services. This convergence of voice and data will enable a host of new capabilities that can dramatically improve your company’s competitive advantage.
With IBM System i IP Telephony and Integrated Collaboration solutions, you can get the business benefits and simplicity you seek from both your telephony and IT environments, with one integrated, secure and reliable solution delivered by two industry leaders.
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Now deploy a complete unified communications solution on one easy-to-manage platform with Power Systems.
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