IP Connections
Unify communications with legacy equipment
Media gateways can make UC solutions work with existing PBX gear.
by Bud Walder
Given the current worldwide credit crunch, market meltdowns and contracting economies, enterprise IT departments are being challenged to make do with their existing voice infrastructure wherever possible, while finding ways to introduce new unified communications (UC) solutions and services that can provide direct savings or measurable productivity enhancements. With an incremental strategy, saving money and breathing new life into old gear with new IP applications and media gateways is possible.
Most of the applications and services that have been introduced into the enterprise in the past few years leverage the IP network via voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology to deliver cost efficiencies. VoIP media gateways provide a cost-effective bridge between legacy voice networks and systems to IP services, applications and networks. Voice and fax traffic enters one side as traditional circuit-switched analog or digital telephony signals and exits as packet-switched VoIP transmitted over the corporate LAN or WAN. Originally designed to circumvent the voice service toll charges of the public switched telephone networks, VoIP media gateways are now utilized to add unique applications to legacy voice infrastructure to help enterprise customers get more life and value from those assets.
Many enterprise voice industry leaders are tackling UC with new IP PBX-based solutions, which means big investments and forklift overhauls. Some companies, however, are approaching UC from the software side and leveraging e-mail and corporate instant messaging servers and clients. A VoIP media gateway can provide the necessary glue to make these UC solutions work with existing PBX gear.
Solutions to improve mobility can also be added via a media gateway bridge. The mobile user gets features such as four-digit extension dialing, ad hoc conferencing and call transfers, as well as single number service to call desk and mobile voice numbers, and voice mail.
Unified messaging (UM) is also being delivered as an IP application. Bringing together voice, e-mail and fax messages in one place delivers productivity gains, and many UM solutions utilize speech recognition and text to speech to enhance remote access to messages, which can be useful for people on the go. From a deployment standpoint, IP-based UM solutions allow a multisite organization to deploy a single centralized messaging server, and by leveraging the WAN and VoIP media gateways, consolidate the messaging traffic for the organization.
A VoIP media gateway can connect a new UM solution to an old PBX for a single site installation, as well.
Fax-over-IP servers, or FoIP servers, also can be implemented into a mixed PBX infrastructure using FoIP media gateways, which can support both voice and fax traffic.
Bud Walder is the enterprise marketing manager,
Dialogic Corp., Montreal, Canada.
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