For the solopreneur wishing to add voice services to his or her online communications suite, it is probably as simple as downloading an app. And for many small-medium enterprises, it’s really not that much more difficult, as John Macario, Channel and Enterprise Marketing SVP at Ribbon Communications, reflected.
“For a 100-person company, you can basically say, You know what, I’m going to start doing my voice calling through Teams, I’m going to come in over the weekend, migrate my users over, train them on Monday and shut my PBX down. Fantastic.” If you’re already on Microsoft 365 and have adopted other Teams features naturally, then it is mainly a case of upgrading licensing, with minimal infrastructure implications.
Scale things up though, and the complexity explodes. “If I’m the CIO of a 10,000-person enterprise, with PBXs scattered around the world, and I am not familiar 150 offices, you can’t migrate to Teams over a weekend. It’s going to take some time. What you need in this situation is a migration strategy, as opposed to a cutover. That’s where the challenge really comes in,” Macario continued.
Complexity Without Chaos
It is situations such as these that Ribbon’s experience plays to its greatest strength, by ensuring that a systematic transition happens without disruption to critical services, regardless of the size and complexity of the task. And it’s not just business – public sector organisations such as hospitals and universities have equally critical communications needs and multi-site systems, perhaps with even greater need to seamlessly transition legacy infrastructure and maximise efficiency.
The cost benefits will also differ according to the scale of the migration, as Macario pointed out. “If you are a small company, the advantages of upgrading your voice communications infrastructure is pretty simple. Even though you’ve only got one PBX, you probably still have a maintenance contract with the vendor who sold it to you. And you are paying every time a change is made.”
With larger organisations, there are serious ROI implications for upgrading voice infrastructure, as well as policy and routing decisions to be made. Human resources requirements will also change, when you’re no longer supporting a range of legacy call control platforms. Ribbon’s decades of experience helps to make these unknowns quantifiable as you co-create a migration roadmap, thanks to their wholly interoperable middleware, which agonistically integrates with any existing system, to create a common communications core.
Managing for Minimal Disruption
Partnering with a provider like Ribbon for the project management aspect of the transition means that global enterprise scale upgrades will not be out of scope –– thanks to their provenance selling infrastructure to the service providers themselves, as they continue to transition from TDM calling to VoIP.
“Ribbon has been, and continues to be, at the heart of transitioning big carriers from legacy to IP-based voice infrastructure.” Macario pointed out.
“If you’re going into, say, Verizon, to help them with their network transformation, you’re going to learn a few things along the way. After a decade and a half or so, you have a pretty good understanding of what works and what doesn’t work.
“So we’ve taken valuable lessons from these massive carrier transformations around the world, and brought them down to the enterprise. If you think about it, a big enterprise often can be as complex as a medium-sized service provider, probably not as complex as the Verizon network, but certainly complex enough to learn from those best practices”
Therefore, up to and including Verizon-level complexity, Ribbon is the place to start your enterprise voice migration conversation in 2022. The first step is to speak to a member of the Ribbon team to learn more!
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