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The Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), a New York-based advocacy group, took this route recently. The organization has deployed a hybrid VoIP solution for about 200 full-time employees and some 250 PC seats for part-time or volunteer workers. For special events like AIDS Walk New York, when considerably more volunteers get involved, GMHC must scale up quickly. "I had to consider burst capability," says Dave Tainer, director of information systems at GMHC, which relies on gear from Cisco Systems Inc. and is using a $1.1 million grant from the city to completely modernize its infrastructure.
"There are two ways to do VoIP; you either connect to a SIP trunk or connect to a standard T1/PRI," Tainer says. "We decided to do T1 PRI. So we have VoIP internally but to the external world we present as a PBX." (PRI refers to Primary Rate Interface, a commonly used Integrated Services Digital Network technology.) He acknowledges that the pure VoIP road would have led to more cost savings on monthly charges, but "security is still kind of iffy in that area."
Yankee Group numbers indicate that this hybrid model is popular among companies that have deployed IP-based communications gear or plan to do so within two years. A recent survey showed that fully half of the 302 respondents, which ranged in size from midsized to large enterprises, have already deployed some IP gear, or use hybrid or IP-enabled PBX gear. Of these, 30% said they run pure IP-based PBX equipment. The remainder run either managed IP PBXes or hosted IP PBX or IP Centrex implementations. Among the total organizations surveyed, 86% said they have already deployed IP-based communications solutions. The rest say they plan to do so in that two-year window.
"So far, [VoIP is] definitely an inside-the-firewall protected asset," agrees Scott Jenkins, CEO of The EBS Group, a Lenexa, Kan.-based systems integrator that helps midmarket companies with their database and collaboration systems. "We had a California branch and those people, in order to be on our VoIP, had to VPN in. Or we sent them a VoIP phone, but they had to go through a secure VPN tunnel into our network." The bulk of his customers have similar setups.
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