My last few blogs have discussed some of the reasons to look at
using Citel’s Portico
TVA to SIP enable legacy handsets, be
they digital, Centrex or analog when you migrate
to VoIP. I posed the question last time if you even need to use an IP phone
when you do the move and gave a case for skipping that product completely.
There are some significant direct cost savings should you decide to retain your
legacy handsets when moving to IP telephony but there are also a number of
intangible costs that many people tend to disregard to their detriment in their
evaluation
The most intangible cost is environmental, a growing concern that
all of us have to address. If you are only going to go the “rip and replace”
direction until your employees are ready to move to softphones or use one of
the many other multipurpose devices (remember BYOD) for their calling what
happens to the IP phone?
IP phones tend to be built
with disposal in mind. Most are not as well built as the old desk phone you
have on your desk that may have been around for decades and will only have a
limited life. What happens to those orphan phones? In the past desk phones were made to last and
many have years of service and usability left. There used to be a very large
remanufacturing industry built up around phones but there are so many used
phones out there now the market is failing due to over-supply. The mantra of the 1990’s of Reuse, Reduce,
Recycle has been replaced by Recycle, Recycle, Recycle but again there is a
cost to that process and a limited demand for the ground up pellets that
results. If you reuse your existing phones there is an environmental benefit
that cannot be quantified.
Although a tangible cost, the book value of existing handsets are
still one of those costs that many people forget to build into the migration cost
equation. Due to accounting
methodologies applied by many companies those same legacy phones may still have
some value on corporate books and a move to IP phones could result in a write
off of the corresponding amount on the books. You still have to write off any remaining
investment in the PBX but as many of those are End of Life already that write
off has to happen no matter what you do.
There are two other intangible costs that are often forgotten when
looking at VoIP migration; the cost of
disrupting the workforce as changes are made to the telephony system and the
cost of training people on new phones.
Many people ask what disruption. Well, if the migration occurs
during downtime, the “rip and replace” process
is not an issue. But when do you find that downtime. I know of one instance
where new cabling for the new IP phones was to be run on a holiday weekend only
for the union involved refusing to work on a holiday weekend. For that entity, they operated on a 24/7
basis (think of a hospital as an example) and had real trouble making time
available for changes without affecting day to day operations. For some universities upgrading cabling and
installing PoE switches can only be done as part of campus wide renovations
that can stretch over a five to seven year period. Operational cost savings can
be delayed for years under a scaled in implementation. Not an issue when using
existing equipment on a new VoIP platform.
The last intangible cost is training employees. These days there is
so much education already occurring on the job that having to learn how to use
a new phone is for many companies a step too far. I have been amazed by the number of people I
have spoken to who are delaying VoIP migration because they do not want to have
to teach their employees how to use a new phone. Maybe short sighted but a fact
of life.
If you want to see how to reduce the cost of migration call us or go
to www.citel.com. VoIP migration should be
easy.
(Written by: Ian Gomm / http://citelblogs.com/ )
(Written by: Ian Gomm / http://citelblogs.com/ )
