Should businesses take an evolutionary approach to VoIP? Or should they bite the bullet and completely replace their existing TDM systems?

Sunnyvale, CA-based privately held ShoreTel, which has been selling IP-PBX systems for business for a decade, says ‘replace.’

ShoreTel VP of Marketing, Steve Timmerman, is blunt.

“The evolutionary approach is good for Avaya. It isn’t good for customers,” he says. “Nobody is investing in TDM anymore – it’s a dead end. The choice for customers is whether you want to go through the death by 1,000 cuts or make the leap once.”

A hybrid environment is complex to manage — Timmerman calls it a “nightmare” — and doesn’t scale. More important, a pure IP environment sets the stage for more efficient business operations and new customer services. “Cost savings isn’t the driver,” Timmerman explains. “The real benefit of pure IP is applying it to the business.”

ShoreTel has been in business for 10 years and was founded as an IP PBX company when few people were thinking about IP telephony besides VoIP pundit Jeff Pulver. Even as recently as 2002, the company hired an engineer from a traditional PBX company that pooh-poohed the idea of IP-PBX.

“He had proposed a voice over Ethernet system and they didn’t believe you could do that,” recalls ShoreTel founder Ed Basart.

Although it’s not as well known as competitor Cisco, ShoreTel has achieved rapid and steady growth — 366 percent over the past five years, according to Timmerman, and has been profitable for the past two. The company’s customers include the City of Oakland, CA and the staffing company, Robert Half International.

Infonetics, Infotech, and Deloitte & Touche rank ShoreTel as one of the fastest growing IP-PBX companies and it was named one of the Silicon Valley Fast 50 by the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal.

Timmerman acknowledges that lack of visibility is one of the company’s principal challenges. “We’re in only three of ten deals,” he says. “We’re competing with giants and we beat them on a regular basis.”

He ticks off the ways that ShoreTel’s PBX outpaces the competition.

The first is system architecture. ShoreTel’s PBX is designed more as an appliance rather than a system.

“We have a distributed switch-based architecture – there is no disk or hard drive,” Timmerman explains. “It runs on an embedded operating system - VxWorks.” With server intensive architectures, the design used by many PBX systems, the disk drive is the most likely point of failure. Without these “moving parts,” ShoreTel’s architecture delivers higher reliability, contends Timmerman.

Another benefit of this architecture is scalability. “You can scale from a few users to thousands with a single architecture,” Timmerman explains. “You just add an additional switch to the rack.”

In a comparison of system cost and complexity for Avaya, Cisco, Nortel and ShoreTel by the New York research firm Nemertes, ShoreTel took the first place for set-up ease: an average of 69 minutes. (Avaya was second at 77 minutes, Nortel next at 186 minutes and Cisco took last place with 250 minutes per user).

The second way that ShoreTel shines is ease of configuration, installation and management, according to Timmerman. “We have a one page price book – three switches, two gateways, five phones. You mix and match.”

And customers don’t have to worry about obsolescence. “The 1998 switch is still l supported by the current software,” he says.

ShoreTel comes with a Web browser-based system management application. “Other vendors still have a CLI [command line interface] to manage,” Timmerman explains. “That’s a nightmare. Other vendors have multiple interfaces. ShoreTel has a single image of all your offices. You can manage the entire systems with one view.”

The third competitive feature that Timmerman points to is the company’s ergonomic phones. “Our phones have a unique design. They have a concave surface – they’re easy to look at. Speakers and microphones are high quality.”

ShoreTel also provides a desktop personal call manager GUI. “We have people who never touch the phone,” Timmerman reports. The call manager also interfaces with Microsoft Outlook.

The company also has wireless integration in the pipeline. “We’re working on putting applications on a cell phone that make it look like a phone on the company IP-PBX,” says Timmerman.

But what does all this functionality cost? Here, too, ShoreTel gives competitors a run for their money. Capital, start-up and maintenance costs are a third to half those of other competitors, according to another Nemertes study.

At the same time, ShoreTel gets high marks from customers, receiving a number one ranking for customer service from the Nemertes survey.

“You don’t compete with giants unless you have a better system,” Timmerman observes.

Last week Asterisk users got a peek at their Christmas present from Digium: a beta version of the new AsteriskNow GUI. A formal announcement and a splashy launch are in the works for December.

But as important as a user-friendly Asterisk interface is, even more important, the development signals a new direction for the creator of the open source PBX, according to Digium VP of Product management Bill Miller.

While the company promises that it will continue to serve the open source community, it’s also aiming to make new Asterisk converts, especially among users without Linux or Asterisk experience.

“We are clearly investing in Asterisk products and software appliances — packages that include Linux, and Asterisk and are focused very specifically on target markets,” he explains. “The intent is plug-and-play, 10 minutes to dial tone.”

But isn’t Digium positioning itself to cannibalize the ecosystem that it has fostered around Asterisk?

Well for years Digium didn’t develop a GUI for exactly that reason despite the fact that customers have been asking for a Digium branded GUI.

Now the company wants its ecosystem partners to expand their horizons to reach a changing market.

“We want to make it easier to build applications because it’s applications that are driving voice, not IP-PBX,” explains Miller. “The GUI is very easy to customize, to brand. We want people to build on it. We’re enabling lots of people to go after different parts of the market.”

Miller certainly isn’t thinking small.

“We have a tremendous roadmap to help people use Asterisk to take over the world with open source,” he says. “We’re looking at a whole series of new ways to reach people beyond Asterisk.org. We’re going to add significant new capabilities to the site. Stay tuned for new developments. Wait ’til you see VON.”

For small- and medium-sized businesses, going VoIP is no easy matter. The choices are complex and confusing.

Because of the perceived risks, most small and medium businesses are not ready to move completely to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) in one move. Instead small and medium businesses are looking for an incremental transition from the world of analog to VoIP.

TalkSwitch offers an upgradeable line of hybrid PBX systems to fit the need — starting with the TS-24-CA supporting two lines and four extensions and continuing to the TS-48-CVA supporting 16 lines and 32 local and 32 remote extensions.

The newly released version 4.0 of the PBX software now extends VoIP support beyond trunks to the extensions, allowing an organization to use both analog and SIP phones.

We tested the TS-48CVA with version 4.0 software, a TS-400 phone, a TS-600 phone, a Polycom SoundPoint IP 601 SIP phone, and an Aastra 390 analog phone.

Read the editor’s review or post your own.

Once upon a time, when you wanted to make a phone call you had to find a telephone. Now the cell phone network finds us.

That’s where Internet connectivity is going in the not-too-distant future, says Peter Thornycroft, Vo-Fi Solutions Product Manager at Sunnyvale, CA-based enterprise networking company Aruba Networks.

“It’s a mobility-centric view,” says Thornycroft, explaining Aruba’s vision of the new mobile enterprise. “What we do is decide who you are and what device you’re on and we follow you around.”

Thornycroft knows what he’s talking about. The three-year old privately held company currently has about 3,000 customers; including what the company believes to be two of world’s largest mobile wireless networks: Microsoft, whose network covers 70 buildings world-wide, and Ohio State University with 10,000 access points. Aruba also provides the infrastructure for Verizon’s Managed Wireless LAN service.

Thornycroft is a big fan of dual-mode phones that have come on the market in recent months. “We’re seeing a new generation of WiFi/cell phones,” he says. “We think the simplest model is a single number and a single device.”

But carrier networks aren’t ready yet to support the capacities of these devices.

“What’s been happening recently is that customers have been calling us and telling us ‘I’ve been using this phone and I’d like it to this and this,’” he says. “But the cellular carriers haven’t considered what you need to do when the fixed-mobile network hits the corporate environment.”

But Aruba has been thinking about it and has boiled it down to two approaches.

The first is a PBX-centric approach. In this model, the desk phone with a DID number becomes the single number that reaches you wherever you are. The PBX decides where the phone is - in the WiFi or cell universe - and directs the call appropriately.

The second approach is - as you might guess - carrier-centric. In this model the carrier makes the decision about where the phone is and routes the call. This approach offers carriers an entrée into the enterprise with managed services.

“We see a huge number of customers that haven’t been touched by WiFi,” Thornycroft reports. “A lot are deterred by the unknowns. They don’t know the costs of deployment, they don’t have the RF expertise, they don’t have the help desk expertise. That’s why we’re keen to see service providers take on those tasks. That’s when we see the market opening up.”

While it sounds pretty straightforward - decide where the phone is and send the call there - there are some significant icebergs below the surface.

“One of the key questions is deciding when the phone is moving out of WiFi range,” says Thornycroft. “You can quickly go from a good signal to no signal. With WiFi you need to be concerned as you leave access points - you need to make decisions pretty accurately and pretty quickly.”

Which brings up the - no pun intended - thorny question of the call handover between WiFi and cell networks. Answers remain elusive. Although several vendors claim to have solutions - Bridgeport Networks, Global IP Sound, Kineto Networks, and Hellosoft just to name a few - none are in production.

“There’s a lot of debate about how valuable it is to add complexity to handle call handover,” Thornycroft says. The biggest market for fixed-mobile phones is Japan, where handoff is done manually by the caller. “Until we get a few more [devices] out there and get some user behavior data, we won’t know.”

Thornycroft sees a five-step roadmap to the “holy grail” of complete fixed-mobile convergence.

Step one was 2005 where the greatest challenge was getting the phones to work.

In 2006, we’re at step two: wireless LAN scalability to thousands and tens of thousands of access points. For example, NTT Data in Japan (another Aruba customer) is upgrading to support 8,000 devices. Each employee will have a PDA and a dual mode phone.

Thornycroft sees handover-helper software enabling premises-based fixed-mobile convergence in 2007 - step three. He also foresees this happening with off-the-shelf phones and PBX vendors offering APIs for their systems. “If you’re an Avaya customer, you’ll want Avaya features on your mobile implementation as well.”

The next step happens when carriers integrate architecture that lets them offer fixed-mobile services over a wireless LAN. “You can then sell the same services sold to residential customers to small business,” Thornycroft explains.

The final step is a seamless network - everything is IP - which Thornycroft sees happening in 2008.

“We think WiFi will be a big part of the architecture,” he says. In the meantime, “we’re trying to be a good citizen and accommodate all these architectures for fixed-mobile convergence.”

For small- and medium-sized businesses, going all-VoIP is not an easy decision.

Fortunately, the switch-over, which can result in substantial savings and add bold new capabilities to tired old office phone systems, can be done in baby-steps: Purchase an Internet Protocol (IP) based phone system, but keep the PSTN lines, for now.

It is indeed possible to integrate VoIP into an existing office analog system, keeping current phone services intact while routing costly toll calls out over IP. Until recently, though, the hardware needed for such integration was difficult to use and expensive.

There are two ways to route calls between VoIP and the PSTN: subscribe to an Internet Telephony Service Provider (ITSP) or keep the PSTN lines and purchase equipment to make the conversion.

Keeping the PSTN lines requires VoIP gateways to convert the PSTN signal to a VoIP signal. For analog lines, these gateways need a Foreign Exchange Office (FXO) port.

Until recently, most reasonably priced VoIP gateways had only one or two FXO ports - enough ports for home use, but too few for small businesses and remote offices.

The average price for a four FXO port VoIP gateway was $400-$500, until Linksys released the SPA400.

The Linksys SPA400 is an attractive low-cost ($295) four FXO port solution that costs $100 less than its peers.

The official position from Linksys is that the SPA400 will only work with the Linksys SPA9000, but we’ve figured out how configure the SPA400 to work with other systems.

We share the the Open Source PBX Asterisk and the CommuniGate Pro Internet Communication System configurations at Voxilla.com.