Given the economic realities of the frame relay upgrade, Lexent's IT group didn't encounter much resistance to the VPN or, later, the VoIP project, except at first from the team within IT that had negotiated the new frame relay deal.
"First we had to sell ourselves on the idea by building a strong business case. Once we had that, we were able to diffuse any outside resistance," Arduini says.
But Arduini's team isn't quite finished selling VoIP. Before IT can add IP phones to a remote site, it has to produce a business case for migrating voice to IP. Lexent can convert a site to IP only when its legacy phone system lease runs out, or if the site needs a particular feature the existing phones don't have. For example, employees who work both in the office and in the field might need IP's mobility. "Until we reach this point with a site, we cannot make a strong enough business case for replacing the existing phone instruments," Arduini says.
Even though the VPN infrastructure is in place, the phones Lexent chose aren't inexpensive: The Cisco 7940 IP phones are about $545 apiece plus the $160-per-user licensing fee for Unity Unified Messaging, Cisco's VoIP application that integrates e-mail, voicemail and fax into a single box. The company chose the higher-end IP phones because of their online corporate directory and XML features.
|
15 Minutes with Charles Arduini CTO, Lexent, New York
|
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
There are many network courses that can address your present job's priorities and help you gain the needed skills to keep pace with industry changes and new technologies.
