Last month we had a roadshow in South Africa. My vegetarian friends will have to forgive me… but what a wonderful place! Over dinner while enjoying a really good rump steak and a glass of Pinotage, we met with an IT manager from a large enterprise that was interested in our IP Phone solution.
During the meeting, the IT manager explained his challenges and concerns.
His company recently selected an IP phone vendor for Skype for Business. Unfortunately, it didn’t provide the solution they were expecting and now they need to find a proper solution to their issues. Their call quality was poor, the phones weren’t user-friendly and the architecture design didn’t allow them to use media bypass.
But his first and major concern was cost savings:
Today, they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on their infrastructure and bandwidth for communication between and in branches.
In between bites I introduced the AudioCodes solution and vision which is to not only to provide IP Phones but to offer a full solution. I explained how he can take advantage of our solution to solve his concerns.
Firstly, we are the only vendor in the market today that supports SILK and OPUS in our IP Phones.
SILK, the Skype for business native codec, is a dynamic breathing codec that adjusts to the bandwidth dynamically during the call according to the network capabilities and restrictions. If there is a good network, SILK will use wide band crystal clear high definition quality (even better than G.722). But if someone downloads a large file or a home user’s infrastructure is poor, SILK dynamically will decrease the required bandwidth, to even lower than what G.729 uses, allowing users to have a conversation without any chopped voice or interruptions. (SILK can overcome Packet loss, jitter and delay).
But SILK doesn’t only solve the bandwidth and quality issue; it also saves a lot of expenses on infrastructure as it consumes only 30% to 50% of the required bandwidth.
I mentioned to him that the improved voice quality and savings in bandwidth and infrastructure costs apply even to a greater extent in cases where communications is provided from the cloud by a hosted UC provider.
I noticed the gentleman’s eyes getting wider and a big smile emerging on his face. I heard him saying that if he could save 40% of the required bandwidth, he could save hundreds of thousands of dollars on the first year and additional 10% on the call traffic every year! And all this, simply due to using AudioCodes phones with SILK!
But that’s not all. Just imagine, I told him, that call quality complaints will decrease dramatically as well and user satisfaction and productivity will rise. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. We still haven’t discussed the savings that can be had by using AudioCodes IP Phone manager.
The IT manager paused for a second and asked what he should do with the phones that are currently using G.729 and G.711 and the PSTN calls? I need to divert all these calls to the core and transcode them in the mediation server, he continued, since our current SBC doesn’t support SILK. (He meant that all these calls must now go through the HQ Datacenter core, overloading the core network and introducing VoIP challenges such as long delays, packet loss and jitter).
I was happy to respond that since AudioCodes not only offers SILK IP phones but SBCs that support SILK as well, they can be used in the core while the calls will use media bypass. This will save a lot of money, and prevent having frustrated users and a complex and clumsy design.
At AudioCodes, I summed up, our products provide a full solution, using our entire ecosystem encompassing our IP Phones and SBCs, to provide end-to-end SILK capabilities including resiliency, should for whatever reason, Skype for Business become unavailable. But most importantly, these solutions can save your organization a lot of money on the infrastructure.
Satisfied, we both turned to enjoy our steaks…..
To learn more about AudioCodes IP Phone family, click here: