Solutions - IP Telephony

IST IP Telephony solution and its major components:

The communications industry, and industry analysts in general, now widely accept and acknowledge that IP has become the universal transport medium for organizations and enterprise networks. Vendors are rapidly adopting and migrating to IP as the transport for data, voice, and video applications further endorses this transition to a converged networking paradigm. This migration even includes those vendors who have historically used time-division multiplexing (TDM) infrastructures and relied upon traditional practices. The message is clear: the move toward IP is happening now.

IST provides end-to-end IP network solutions based on open standards, with an established portfolio of integration and professional services together with custom developed applications and an ecosystem of partners to support your transition. The IST IP Telephony solution is the leading converged network telephony solution for organizations that want to increase productivity and reduce the costs associated with managing and maintaining separate voice and data networks. The flexibility and sophisticated functionality of a Cisco based IP network infrastructure provides the framework that permits IST's Professional Services Teams to rapidly deploy emerging applications such as desktop IP Telephony, unified messaging, video telephony, desktop collaboration, enterprise application integration with IP phone displays, and collaborative IP contact centers. These applications enhance productivity and increase enterprise revenues.

A converged network environment provides a superior level of business resilience and agility, and IST Telephony solutions do just that. Designed from the ground up for converged network environments, IP Telephony solutions dramatically enhance communications flexibility and effectiveness.

To meet the business requirements, IST will firstly assist in determining and sizing these requirements and base the solution on one of the following main deployment models "or a blend of them when multiple sites with differing requirements are present":-

Single-Site - The single-site model for IP telephony consists of a call processing agent, located at a Single-Site and a LAN or metropolitan area network (MAN) to carry voice traffic throughout the site. Calls beyond the LAN or MAN use the public switched telephone network (PSTN). If an IP WAN is incorporated into the single-site model, it is for data traffic only; no telephony services are provided over the WAN.

Multiple-Site WAN model with centralized call processing - consists of a single call processing agent that provides services for many sites and uses the IP WAN to transport voice traffic between the sites. The IP WAN also carries call control signaling between the central site and the remote sites.

Multi-site WAN model with distributed call processing - consists of multiple independent sites, each with its own call processing agent connected to an IP WAN that carries voice traffic between the distributed sites. The IP WAN in this model does not carry call control signaling between the sites because each site has its own call processing agent.

Clustering over the IP WAN - This model deploys a single Cisco CallManager cluster across multiple sites that are connected by an IP WAN with QoS features enabled.
Figure 1-1
illustrates a typical IP Telephony solution employing the Cisco IP network infrastructure, with Cisco CallManager as the call processing agent.

Cisco CallManager
Cisco CallManager is the software-based call-processing component of the IP telephony solution. The software extends enterprise telephony features and functions to packet telephony network devices such as IP phones, media processing devices, voice-over-IP (VoIP) gateways, and multimedia applications. Additional data, voice, and video services such as unified messaging, multimedia video conferencing, collaborative contact centers, and interactive multimedia response systems interact with the IP telephony solution through Cisco CallManager's open telephony application programming interface (API). IST will install Cisco CallManager on the hardware model and sizing that best suits the business and operational needs - Cisco Media Convergence Server (MCS) 7800, Hewlett Packard DL300 or IBM x300 series servers.

The Cisco CallManager software includes a suite of integrated voice applications that perform ad-hoc voice conferencing and browser-based attendant console functions. The key benefit of all of these voice applications is that special-purpose voice processing hardware is not required. Supplementary and enhanced services such as hold, transfer, forward, conference, multiple line appearances, automatic route selection, speed dial, and last-number redial are available on Cisco CallManager.
These features are easily extended to every IP phone in the network through centralized Cisco CallManager administration and automatic configuration. Cisco CallManager also provides extension mobility so users can log in to any IP phone and the extension and the individual's dial privileges are applied to the phone regardless of their location. This gives users the ability to access all of their personal phone features, such as fast dials, personal contacts, voice mail, productivity applications, and more from any IP phone when they are away from their desktop.

And because it is a software application that has been sized and configured by IST Professional Services designers, enhancing its capabilities in production environments is a matter of upgrading software on the server platform, thereby avoiding expensive hardware upgrade costs. Further, Cisco Survivable Remote Site Telephony provides a cost-effective solution for extending Cisco CallManager features to small sites while ensuring high availability of basic telephony functions, and allows enterprises to offer value-added capabilities to all employees in the organization regardless of their location.
Multiple Cisco CallManager servers are clustered and managed as a single entity. The capability of clustering multiple call-processing servers on an IP network is unique in the industry. Scalability for up to 10,000 users per cluster is provided.

By providing a design that interlinks multiple clusters, system capacity can be increased to up to 100,000 users per multiple cluster system. Clustering aggregates the power of multiple distributed Cisco CallManagers, enhancing the scalability and accessibility of the servers to phones, gateways, and applications. Triple server redundancy improves overall system availability (N=1). Call admission control ensures that voice quality of service (QoS) is maintained across constricted WAN links, and automatically diverts calls to alternate public switched telephone network (PSTN) routes when WAN bandwidth is not available.

Our Professional Services Team can also assist with all aspects of the LAN, WAN, Wireless and associate multimedia aspects of the solution.

Voicemail
Cisco Unity is a class-leading unified messaging solution that supports either Microsoft Exchange or
IBM (Lotus) Domino as the back-end message store. Unity is also offered as a standalone voicemail
system using only Microsoft Exchange as a local message store.

Customers are given the option of remaining in queue or leaving a voicemail. Voicemail boxes are set up corresponding to each of the voice queues. Unity records the message and stores it in the Cisco Message Store.

The Cisco E-Mail Manager Option can be used to retrieve the message from the Cisco Message Store. Cisco E-Mail Manager Option then routes the message to the specific skill group handling that queue. Agents listen to the message via a standard media player .

Fax
Another key component of the IP Telephony solution that is often incorporated in a solution is the Fax. Fax messages are received by a fax server. The server attaches the fax to an email and delivers it to a predefined inbox. Cisco E-Mail Manager Option takes the message from the inbox and delivers it to an agent. Additional features can be incorporated using the RightFax set of products if required. These offer the ability to send and receive faxes in campaigns together with recording and reporting on the faxes.