A VoIP early adopter
IT’S NO SURPRISE to step into a hotel at in Dubai Media City or an office in London and see a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony system, but one seldom steps into an office back home in South Africa and sees one.
Companies, it seems, are still battling to justify the costs with a return on investment. There also seems to be too many risks in getting it wrong. But, many ICT companies, like Datatec and Dimension Data, are relying on unified communications to be a growth driver globally over the next few years.
Didata says it conducted world-wide research late last year, surveying 900 IT managers and end-users internationally showing they saw value in deploying unified communications, but didn’t know where to start.
What IT companies need are case studies to present to their potential clients. Once there have been a string of successful early adopters, others will follow.
One such early adopter in the South African market has been Sasfin, the listed specialist banking and financial services group.
Didata said Sasfin had decided to go for an IP telephony solution, while investigating upgrading its old head office PABXs (switchboards).
It had also decided to upgrade its entire network to standardise to Cisco equipment at the same time. And Didata installed Microsoft Exchange 12 as the Unified Messaging Platform and integrated this with Cisco CallManager 5.
This means that Sasfin users can now access all types of messages, voice and email from the same Inbox, either on their computers, touchtone phones or over the Internet, which should make them more efficient.
Banks are notoriously reluctant to let IT companies use them in case studies. But Sasfin said it was already experiencing lower telephony costs and reduced management overheads because they didn’t have to rely on multiple vendors for support.
Finweek
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