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Has Cisco Found its Voice?
Cisco got into the VoIP business early on with its purchase of Selsius Systems in 1998 and has managed to maintain market share -- and mind share -- ever since. It's been preaching the benefits of VoIP and bringing along legacy providers, like Avaya and Nortel, kicking and screaming.
Cisco has some good reasons for promoting this style of convergence. For one, unlike its main competitors, which dominate the voice market in North America, Cisco didn't have any presence in voice at all. VoIP gives it an entry point. For another, since a VoIP application requires such robust networking, there is the potential for increased sales of switching and routing equipment as enterprises upgrade their infrastructures.
Cisco also gets credit for integrating voice features into its switches and routers. The Catalyst 4224 is a good example: It integrates routing, switching, gateway and CallManager functionality into a branch-office solution. With CallManager 3.1, the 4224 can route calls even if the CallManager goes down (see "Cisco's Catalyst 4224 & CallManager: Branch Office VoIP That Really Works," at www.nwc.com/1220/ 1220sp2.html). Innovations like these provide more options for customers and help Cisco sell more hardware.
You will indeed find Cisco phones sprinkled throughout many organizations. The company was able to take advantage of its base and encourage a lot of customers to purchase starter kits to do a VoIP pilot with CallManager, which has been greatly improved from the original Selsius system. Cisco has also done a great job providing Web-based documentation to ease the pain of installation.
And CallManager is still improving, though in the voice world, which is accustomed to rock-solid PBXes, this isn't necessarily a good thing. Constant upgrades and the ensuing necessary downtime is a concept alien to those in the voice world. To make this go mainstream, Cisco will have to find a stable version of code and stop "fixing" it.
In spite of Cisco's lip service to the new world of openness and standards that its VoIP solution ushers in, the company continues to embrace the same proprietary thinking as its legacy-based competitors. Although the cost of Cisco's slick, LCD-enabled phones has dropped, they're still pricey and continue to be the only phones that work with Cisco's CallManager IP PBX. Some argue that this is no worse than Nortel's and Avaya's digital phones, which have always been proprietary and expensive. Maybe, but if that's true then it's really just more of the same: another way to lock customers into a proprietary solution.
The problem is that IP and Ethernet have overcome the physical connectivity issues that made it impossible to plug a Nortel digital phone into an Avaya PBX. But for Cisco to walk the walk of the "standards-based, distributed, open architecture" it espouses, it will have to add SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) support to CallManager.
In addition, making the networked infrastructure robust enough to handle VoIP will take more bandwidth and more redundancy. This easily translates into more router and switch sales. While QoS provides some assurance that delay-sensitive voice packets will always get through, it's still a good idea, especially on the LAN, to dispense bandwidth liberally. The redundancy in equipment, though, can add significant costs and negate a lot of the cost savings that VoIP can potentially provide.
While VoIP is still experiencing growing pains, it is building momentum. Nobody is likely to rip out a legacy PBX, but when the time comes to replace it or think about new construction, companies will be looking at the potential cost savings of VoIP, and Cisco is well-positioned to reap the benefits. The company got off to an early lead, and you can be assured that it will channel its resources to make this work. Cisco has the most to gain.
-- Peter Morrissey
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