Under this strategy, the company will rationalise common IT services from individual offices and instead host these as 'shared services' from within their data-centre, accessible to staff via the company intranet. This strategy of 'private cloud' is mirroring the benefits of companies adopting 'public cloud' services and include;
- Cost-savings by rationalising IT services from each of the corporate offices and instead deploy these centrally.
- Reducing the overhead of management and operational staff at each office required maintain these services
- Support agile working so that no matter where staff may be located 'on-net', there core IT services are available to them at the click of a mouse.
- Enhance resilience so that should staff be denied access to the corporate offices and have to work from home or other sites, then their services will follow them
While this data-centre strategy is able to be applied to most of the essential IT and services that the business relies upon for it's day-to-day operations, there is one critical IT service, infact perhaps THE most critical IT service that has had to be excluded from this data-centre strategy, and that is 'Voice'.
Due to legacy limitations in the public telephone network, a company's telephone numbers are hard-wired into a local telephone exchange which is withi a couple of miles of the office being served. This is why telephone numbers for an Edinburgh office are fixed to a single Edinburgh telephone exchange, as are telephone numbers to a London office which are again hard-wired into a telephone exchange in London.
So, while an organisation may have a data-centre strategy that is centralising all IT Services to a couple of sites outside of the major cities, Voice, or rather the ability to receive incoming calls through these data-centres has had to be excluded. As a result, individual offices still need to retain their connectivity to the public telephone network (which requires expensive ISDN circuits), as well as their own PBX to receive and route these calls (which again is an expensive piece of kit to purchase and maintain). Furthermore, each office also needs someone to manage and operate the PBX is there is any failure. All told, this legacy limitation to exclude Voice from a data-centre strategy adds unnecessary cost, complexity and management overhead to any organisation wishing to streamline their operations through the adoption of a data-centre strategy.
Until now.
I see that BT have just launched a new service 'Data Centre Voice' which is aimed explicitly at large organisations wishing to drive the benefits of their data-centre strategy to their voice estate. More information can be found here: http://www.btsmartnumbers.com/business-needs/integrating-voice.html
I understand this service is already being rolled out by a number of major banks and defence organisations, but interestingly it's not only the largest companies that are seeing the benefits of this. A number of medium sized companies with perhaps 15 - 20 UK offices are also realising significant financial and operational benefits from adopting data-centre voice. In some cases, by rationalising PBX and ISDN connectivity from each offices, organisations stand to save hundreds of thousands of pounds per year in fixed cost. In addition, the increase in resilience and organisational agility will contribute still greater benefits of efficiency.
This theme of adopting voice services within a data-centre strategy is gaining significant traction, and I will keep looking at this trend closely in future posts - as well as giving insights into real, tangible benefits that organisations have realised to date.
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