More and more businesses are moving their telecoms systems over to IP and Cloud, and the benefits for doing so are widely accepted. But making the switch is a major project; every part of your organisation will be affected, and in the long term it could have a significant impact on how your operations work.
With that in mind, it is important to put in some careful planning to make sure the project goes smoothly. Here are four key points to consider to before you get started.
1. What do you want to achieve?
Any major project needs to start with a clear vision of how it will improve the business. Deciding to move to VoIP is no different; there needs to be an understanding of what the benefits will be in terms of efficiency, productivity and the bottom line. These should be tangible and measurable, and should form goals to judge the progress of the project against. Technical metrics for areas like quality of service and system uptime can be included in this.
2. What changes need to me made to your IT infrastructure?
Although VoIP is designed to run on the same basic hardware as your internet connection, it is also a specialist system which may make demands your existing IT architecture cannot support. Analyse your LANs, routers, ethernet connections and switches thoroughly, making a note of their technical specs so they can be compared against different products. Don’t settle for shortcuts - weaknesses in the system you have to run VoIP will affect the quality of service you offer.
