VoIP Business Telephone System Upgrade Planning for Mid-Size Organizations

VoIP Business Telephone System Upgrade Planning for Mid-Size Organizations

So your organization is finally planning on upgrading the old PBX, you've got a big project on your hands, and you are looking for the first things that you need to do to plan this beast out. Well have no fear because I have been on the planning, design, deployment and support side of the voice over IP business for 10 years and will give you a big picture overview of what the next 3 to 12 months are going to be like for you.

The first thing that you have to know is what the reasons are for the deployment. It is important to keep the reasons for the upgrade in mind when planning and selecting the new system, so as not to get sidetracked into less important reasons during the process. Here are the most common good reasons ones that we run into:

The old PBX is failing or breaking down all the time.

People are complaining about how old the phone system.

There are potential monthly cost savings by converting to SIP trunking.

You are hearing about improved productivity from other companies using voice over IP systems.

There are a lot of new features available that you need.

There are, however, other benefits to upgrading the existing phone system that you may not have thought of and will come out during the process:

Your old data network gets an upgrade as part of the cost of the new phone system.

There will be an ability to improve business processes.

There are many ways customer service and vendor interactions can be improved.

Faster handset moves, adds, and changes.

This guide assumes that you are looking at getting an on premise voice over IP-based phone system. The other options of getting in on premise traditional PBX system or a hosted voice over IP system are not discussed because they are a minor part of the overall market at this point.

Planning the VoIP Upgrade

So, where do you start? Well, the first step is assessing your current phone system and data network. You have to find out what the current capabilities are that you have, what people like about the system and what they don't like about the system, and especially how the people that are big users of the PBX on the customer and help desk interaction side make use of the current system and want to improve it.

From a calculation standpoint, what it means you have to figure out a bunch of things for every site:

How many analog and digital phones you have. Which analog handsets can be replaced by low end IP phones (usually all of them will be).

How many outside lines you have in the form of voice T-1's and analog ports

Number and type of data T1's at every site. (A T1 can be used for voice, Internet, WAN, or a combination). What do you

Current wide area network per site bandwidth and utilization.

Current local area network switches quantity and location; quantity of used ports per closet.

Any special requirements for ACD, IVR, call recording, handset paging, and application integration.

If you want to get funding support for this you have to get a handle on what your current monthly costs are. Current monthly costs include charges at every site:

Internet and wide area network circuit costs.

PBX lease costs.

PBX monthly service costs. Average cost of additional PBX service on a monthly basis.

Cellphone costs, since some of these can be offset using single number reach.

Monthly conferencing costs.

Monthly maintenance and support on all network hardware and software that may be replaced.

Once you related what your current monthly costs are you're ready to figure out what the budget for your new project is. The best outcome to the new project would be that your new monthly costs are lower than your current monthly costs, after accounting for new equipment installation services and everything else to put the new phone system in place, when financed over a 3 to 5 year period with a one dollar buyout at the end so you own the new system. You may find out during the course of this planning that it will be necessary to get a new Internet phone and wide area network connections in order to realize the desired return on investment so make sure you keep your monthly circuit costs and your financing of equipment, maintenance, and installation separate.

Choosing VoIP vendors and resellers

There are two choices to make next. One of the choices is to determine the manufacturer of the new phone system that you want to purchase, the other choice is to pick a local vendor who's going to do the design installation and support of the new system. To get the best price and the best service on the new system you should go about this in a very specific way. Customers have found in many cases that it's best to get a phone system from a manufacturer who has good local resellers that will do a good installation of the system, a smooth cutover, enabling all the features that they want, and then support them well in an ongoing fashion afterwards. The size of the reseller that you probably want to work with depends on the size and needs of your organization. I recommend that you work with the reseller who is big enough to handle your business but won't be overwhelmed by it and is small enough that your business is important to them and they'll bend over backwards to take care of you.

So how do you find a reseller that's the right size for you? This is where you go back to the phone system manufacturers to get some options. The major phone system vendors are the best source to find out the local resellers. The major vendors of voice over IP systems at this point in time are Cisco Systems, Avaya, Mitel, Shoretel, and Digium Switchvox. If you contact these vendors either online or through their local salespeople you can ask them for a recommendation of their top three resellers who would do a good job for you. After you get those reseller names from the vendor try to get their recommendation of whom that you should really work with, then call that reseller, as well as the other two. At this point you should have three equipment vendors three resellers for these vendors will have nine good options of a local business that will do a great job for your voice over IP upgrade.

Be aware though as soon as you start this process of contacting vendors you are going to start getting phone calls because people know that you're interested. Now, that may be a way that you can find out who's the most eager to get your business, but it also might just give you just indication of who has the most aggressive So be very clear to everyone your expected timeframe is going to be, that you can take your time and select the best vendor review, and if they bug you excessively that will put them on the bottom of your list. By the way, you should start this process at least six months before you want to have a new phone system up and running. It is going to you 2 to 3 months to select a vendor, another month to figure out pricing and financing, and from when you say go it will take about two months to get the equipment then another month to fully set up and cut over to the new phone system.

Vendor expectations

What you should expect from these vendors is that they are going to want to meet with you determine what your needs are, do a walk-through of your existing systems and find out any special requirements that you have. They will then try to sell you on some specific feature that their system has that nobody else has and try to get you to see a demo of their system. I recommend that you see the demo of their system, don't buy into any of their must have exclusive special features, then ask them for a list of reference customers about your size and requirements that you can call and talk to to see how things went.

Definitely call these reference customers and see how the reseller did during the design phase, how competitive their pricing was, how they did during the installation, and what their support was like after the sale. During this part of the engagement is when you have the most leverage and you can get the most things for free. By all means take the time to get some good lunches and get to know the people that are going to potentially doing work for you for. Furthermore find out who is actually going to be doing the installation for you, if they're going to be coming from out of state, or if they are local and are going to be available for support after the installation. Don't be afraid to ask this question as it is perfectly valid and definitely will have a bearing on the outcome of the project and should be a decision factor for you.

At this point you should have proposals from everyone of your vendors and you can start comparing them. Some phone system vendors will try to give you just a monthly cost with a summary description of the parts, then say hey that's the way it's done. Since most of the voice over IP vendors are coming from the data side of business they expect that you're going to be wanting a line item pricing and a bottom-line cost. You can then use this to decide what you want finance or not. If you're not getting this ask for line item pricing and the specific part and model numbers of equipment and a complete breakout of what the annual maintenance costs are going to be.

Annual maintenance is broken down into three areas. Annual product maintenance which provides for support and replacement of hardware and software, upgrade maintenance costs which allows you to upgrade the applications, and a local vendor support contract. All three areas of maintenance are valid. The first two are very important and should be bought in just about all cases, and a local support contract should be purchased if you are not going to have someone qualified to operate the equipment after it's installed.

Since this is a voice over IP system you should expect that you're going to be able to run the system over a new data network and not on a separate network that you put in parallel to the existing one. This means that the company is putting in your voice over IP phone system should have excellent networking capability and be able to demonstrate that they understand Quality of Service, which is tuning the network equipment to differentiate between different types of data and prioritize voice. This is easy to do on a local area network, somewhat challenging to do on a wide-area network, and difficult to do over a firewall connection to the Internet. If you are looking at doing SIP trunking make sure the vendor shows where they are going to apply quality of service on all the SIP voice paths.

Making a VoiP phone system decision

So at this point you should have your line item proposals with all the pricing, with all the installation and maintenance included, have seen the demos, and have gotten a chance to meet with the local vendors and contact their reference customers asked some basic questions. Step back and asked her real basic questions at this point. Ask the vendor if there's anything that you're missing. Ask the vendor if any parts or over engineered. Ask the vendor if this is the best price, then go one step further and ask the reseller if there's any way to get better pricing out of the vendor. Sometimes there is an end of fiscal quarter or year coming up and it's possible to get a few extra points discount or some other concessions thrown in.

During the process you've probably eliminated some vendors from consideration, because you've been trying to narrow your list of nine vendors down to about three. For those six vendors that you eliminate call and give them a good reason so that they deathly know why they're out of the running and what they can do about it in the future with other customers. For the other three, let them know that they made the shortlist and given the timeframe for when you're going to perform the evaluation and the decision.

Go through whatever decision-making process your organization uses and settle on one vendor. As you go through the final contract negotiation with this vendor, the other two on the shortlist who haven't made it are going to be calling you nonstop unless you let them know that you have placed the order with somebody else and that they're out of the running. This is a small industry and there are not a lot of companies that do a good job in this space; I recommend next you let them know that they did not make the cut in a nice professional way and that you appreciate all the hard work that they did on your behalf. At some point in the future you may be calling them for assistance, and you want to make sure that you parted on good terms.

Finally, as you start the installation with your vendor of choice, make sure you work closely with her project management team and get them all the information that you're looking for as quickly as possible. This is going to make your installation go much smoother, faster, and successful.

Hopefully this guide has been helpful to you in describing the process of how to go through and choose a voice over IP solution vendor, as well as give you some idea of what to expect. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments on any parts of this. If you have specific questions about your situation, please contact one of the fine account managers at Adcap Network Systems.

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Adcap Network Systems Atlanta and Miami

Great Local Engineers Creating Systems that Work!

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