Is it time to punt the PBX?

MORE THAN 126 years after the invention of the telephone, the 2002 InfoWorld Telephony Survey shows that what business executives want from their phones is open for debate. Some seek basic services, others want voice/data integration, and a minority sees telephony as a platform for applications. Advances in technology promise increased automation, convenience, and manageability of company phone systems. But are these benefits substantial enough to warrant replacing PBXs that work just fine?

P.J.: Business lives for the telephone. Business people want a dial tone, they want to know who’s on the other end, and they rely on the phone to put them in touch with their customers. But they don’t care how their phones work, despite significant investments in the technology; PBXes and toll-free numbers are ubiquitous, and voice-controlled systems have become the first line of customer service for many enterprises.

In an economic downturn such as the current one, the people who make telephony decisions are loath to invest in technology for technology’s sake. Respondents to the Telephony Survey are no exception: 47 percent of respondents indicate that cost and budget constraints are the greatest deterrent to implementing new telephone technology. So, Tom, explain to me how the gee-whiz factors outweigh dollars and cents.

Tom: Business phone systems are so outdated that users have given up on them. Take a stroll around any corporate campus — what’s the most common type of handset? A cell phone. It’s cordless, it can send and receive text messages, one number follows you everywhere, and you can play your voice mail in the john. When asked which emerging telephony standards they anticipate most, survey respondents cite 3G. Forget VoIP — they’d settle for slow data over cellular.

Beyond matching what cell phones can do, plenty of telephony tasks require more than a dial tone. The survey indicates that videoconferencing, speech recognition, and encryption are widely used. Improved customer interaction is a primary initiator for new telephony purchases, cited by 36 percent of respondents; that points to contact center automation and Web and telephony integration. When it comes to features, 29 percent want unified messaging, 31 percent want IP conferencing, and 37 percent want toll bypass. All that can’t be stuffed into monolithic PBXes, especially when cost-savings is the top objective.

P.J.: Granted, that all sounds nifty. But other factors are at play. Take InfoWorld’s recent experience: This summer, we were a few weeks away from rolling out an IP-based replacement for an aging PBX when we decided to abandon the project. The new gear was in the phone closet and worked fine, but when we moved into new quarters that had a well-maintained phone system, the hardware went back into the boxes, and now it will be sold off. Telephones are like furniture: It’s fine to get the latest and greatest when you have a capital budget to spend, but who’s crazy enough to fix what ain’t broke?

Tom: It’s the purchasing model that’s broken. As evidence, 51 percent of respondents buying new equipment are eyeing turnkey, single-vendor solutions, just as they always have; only 22 percent are now considering flexible, best-of-breed alternatives. IT managers should be able to go to one vendor for call direction, another for voice mail, and a third for voice access to e-mail. The age-old reliance on closed corporate telephony solutions is as constricting as the old Bell residential monopoly.

P.J.: I agree that a proven competitive advantage is a valid reason for upgrading a company’s telephony environment. But because Ma Bell trained us all to expect instant dial tone, end-users won’t accept anything less. Look at the barriers to implementing IP telephony: 49 percent are concerned about interoperability with existing gear, 44 percent believe the feature set is less rich than what they have now with TDM (time-division multiplexing), 43 percent cite lack of applications, and 41 percent are concerned about both reliability and the data network’s capability of handling the traffic.

“Wait and see” is the message we got from survey respondents, and standing pat is a strategy that makes sense in grim economic times.

Tom: Look, forget about unplugging your PBX or putting long distance carriers out of business — for now. Start with one needy department, say your contact center. Invest in a small, standards-based IP phone system on a dedicated LAN segment. Build the load incrementally and troubleshoot as you go, just as you would with any LAN. If you get impatient, content yourself with the fact that the contact center’s cheap IP phone network provides outstanding monitoring, routing, and reporting for a fraction of the cost of a proprietary solution. If you decide to add IVR (interactive voice response) or wireless, all you need is some Cat 5 cable and space in the rack. If IP telephony never replaced your PBX and never gave you free calls to Mexico over the Internet, it would still be worth it.

P.J.: For the past five years, I’ve said that most businesses won’t rip out their existing systems when long-distance calls are a nickel a minute, and if they have access to a working system, they’re foolish to duplicate that setup with unproven Buck Rogers technology.