There’s no doubt about it: a huge shift in voice communication networks is well underway, as enterprises move away from PSTN towards IP.
One of the core reasons for this change is that telecom carriers themselves are transitioning from TDM to SIP, in an effort to reduce their equipment’s operating costs, power consumption and footprint, while taking advantage of advances in voice technology. As a result, within a few years, major carriers will simply declare end-of-service on their TDM and ISDN switches.
On the customer side of the equation, market data shows huge numbers of enterprises leaving behind traditional PSTN voice services as they align themselves with the changes occurring in service provider networks. According to a recent report by IHS, 71% of organizations are making the switch to either a centralized or hybrid SIP trunk. In fact, they predict that between 2015 and 2020, the number of SIP trunk connections will have more than doubled, from 20 million to over 45 million.
A Meaningful Impact
As a large, distributed enterprise, moving your voice communications to all-IP infrastructure opens up a whole host of significant benefits. Besides the immediate financial benefits, the transition to SIP trunks allows organizations to centralize and consolidate trunks, for optimal utilization and the ability to leverage economies of scale.
While making the move to SIP trunks, you can take the opportunity to modernize and centralize the management and control of your network as a whole, to assure service quality, remove blind spots across the network and improve security. More efficient management will contribute to the reduction of your IT staff’s day-to-day workload, so they can allocate more time towards finding innovative ways of driving further efficiencies throughout the organization.
Now that you are using your existing data network (WAN) for voice communications, and having implemented more efficient call routing, monitoring and dial-plan configuration, your internal and long distance calls can be routed through your IP network to achieve substantial savings. As you minimalize the costs of internal communications across your enterprise and reap the benefits of least-cost routing (LCR), you can expect to reduce your total communications expenses by up to 38% (based on information gathered from AudioCodes’ customer base).
The Way Forward
A solution such as AudioCodes’ Universal Communications Architecture (UCA) will allow you to achieve all this, and more. UCA enables large enterprises with multi-vendor communications systems to modernize their voice networks efficiently and cost-effectively. It achieves this by integrating communications silos, connecting with SIP trunk services and utilizing the corporate IP network to optimize call routing.
UCA features AudioCodes’ session border controllers (SBCs), global end-to-end call routing and policy management, and advanced VoIPerfectTM voice optimization technology, enabling the creation of a universal network that offers high voice quality, without having to replace existing communications platforms.
As we have seen, there is much more to all-IP voice communications than just SIP trunks. AudioCodes’ UCA solution enables you begin to derive maximum benefit from the all-IP world today, by delivering a future-proof voice infrastructure that is easy to manage, maintains corporate security and delivers significant capital and operational cost savings.
To learn more about AudioCodes’ Universal Communications Architecture click here to download our Beginner’s Guide to Enterprise Voice Network Modernization.