If traditional, circuit-switched telephone systems are no longer adequate to keep up with your company's communications needs, or your existing network infrastructure is not adequate to fit your needs, it may be time for you to consider convergence.

As you sift through a wide variety of vendors and products, doing your research can be daunting and time-consuming. What you need is a trustworthy, proven company that will back its technology with service, support, and training.

We have the technical expertise and the business savvy to help you determine exactly what you need now and what you will need as you grow. We'll take you from design through deployment. Whether you want to move towards a converged infrastructure all at once, or phase it in gradually, Preferred Technology Solutions can ensure a smooth transition to truly future-ready communications, with maximum ROI.

In many ways. By integrating your voice and data communications, you get the powerful capabilities of the most sophisticated phone systems, and then some, without the cost and complexity.

• Easy moves, adds & changes. In a tremendous boon for small businesses, networked telephony systems allow you to move, add and change phones easily and in minutes. Since the handsets are network devices like your computers or printers, you simply plug them into standard Ethernet jacks anywhere on your network. You eliminate the cost and time required to schedule a service technician every time you want to add or move a telephone.
  
• Multiple auto attendants. Networked telephony solutions feature multiple auto attendants, allowing you to determine how calls are routed through your organization. You can assign an auto attendant for the entire company and for each division, workgroup or individual. You even can use different auto attendants for various times of the day, such as business hours, non-business hours and lunch. As a result, you can organize call patterns to your exact needs, ensuring customers, clients and vendors access their parties for optimal business communications.
  
• Call Detail Reporting (CDR). CDR enables you to track phone usage within the organization, including who makes calls, to where, when and for how long. You also can assign account codes to individual customers or clients to precisely track how much time you spend on the phone with them. As a result, you can bill clients more accurately and easily and improve time management within the company.
  
• Reliability. Select a networked telephony system that works independently of network operating systems. This ensures that your solution will continue to deliver high-quality voice communications even if the rest of your network crashes.

If your business depends on constant incoming calls from customers or vendors, there are more advanced network telephony systems available. The following are some of the capabilities these systems offer.

• Unified Messaging. Traditionally, you segregate your e-mail and voice messages into two separate systems. With an advanced networked telephony solution, you can combine both into a single e-mail application such as Microsoft Outlook Express. This way, all messages are available in one location, ensuring more convenient and efficient communications. Simply click on a voice mail and your computer plays it back. You can listen to your most important voice messages first and save and organize your voice mail in folders as you do with your e-mail. You even can forward your voice mail as e-mail attachments to other users.
  
• Computer/telephony integration (CTI). Advanced networked telephony systems enable small businesses to deploy powerful call-center capabilities that once only large corporations could afford to deploy and operate. By integrating your voice communications and data, a network telephony system can display the records of customers or vendors on your computer automatically and nearly instantly whenever they call. As a result, you greatly improve the response times and accuracy of business-critical departments like sales, customer service or technical support. Even create call hunt groups, ensuring calls are forwarded to the next available agents.
  
• Use your computer as a telephone. With advanced networked telephony, the integration of your voice communications with your Ethernet network is so seamless that you can deploy desktop computers as handsets. When using optional software and headsets, employees can dial their phones from their screens and have all the functionality of a standard telephone. This is especially useful for users in transaction-intensive departments that serve as call centers. As a result, your company can leverage its computers, eliminating the costs of additional handsets, and employees can reduce the clutter on their desktops.
  
• Control and customize telephones without technical expertise. If your networked telephony solution ships with an administration utility, a simple-to-use program that you access with any standard Web browser from any computer on the network, you can easily and completely customize your phones to your exact business requirements. In fact, you control your entire phone system. For example, limit any phone to certain area codes at certain times of the day. Or arrange for the phone to ring at the next available agent in your customer-service department. Additionally, employees can access the utility to tailor phones to their own needs. They can customize the programmable buttons on their telephones for speed dials, forward their calls to other phones, and set-up off-site notification to be notified via phone or pager of new voice-mail messages.
  
• Access messages from home. Advanced networked telephony solutions enable you and your employees to access voice-mail from home. Simply dial into the messaging system from an off-site location, enter your password and access your messages. You also can take full advantage of all of the system’s capabilities from remote locations, such as voice conferencing, just as if you were at the office. As far as callers can tell, you are at the office. As a result, your telecommuters and branch offices rem-ain part of your main office’s telephone system.
  
• The extras come at no extra cost. With the exception of the software and headsets needed to use your computers as telephones, all of these advanced business features are standard on advanced networked telephony solutions.
  

For more information on how Valcom can tailor an IP telephony solution for you, click the button below:

Q. What is 3Com’s background in VoIP?
A. 3com has installed more than 15,000 NBX systems and in excess on 1 million telephones. Our larger system, the VCX is designed to scale to 50,000 lines and beyond, and is based upon proven technology used to provide call routing in some of the worlds largest carriers.

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Q. Does this system depend on the Internet? Is it a service?
A. No. The NBX Converged System is a self contained turn key system that does not rely on Internet connectivity. But the system can leverage Internet connectivity if available, by connecting remote sites and users within the performance constraints of the Internet service.

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Q. My experiments with other IP based communications solutions have concluded that voice quality is poor; is the voice quality of your system similar to my existing telephone system?
A. Yes. A 3Com converged VoIP system automatically configures both privacy and quality of service necessary to ensure voice quality consistent with traditional phone service. This has been proven by independent studies carried out by MierCom Labs published in Business Communications Review (2/03).

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Q. Will VoIP add complexity for my users?
A. No. Using the system will be the same as any other phone system, however users will gain other benefits such as fully integrated voicemail. Users can leverage advanced capabilities such as automatic call routing and even integrate voice messaging with email and dial from their PC’s contact directories.

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Q. How does greater functionality add value?
A. By increasing call handling options like auto-attendant, incoming callers are more likely to get correctly routed. Call Detail Records provide historical information enabling further customization and tuning of the system. A number of additional applications can be added to the system to add call center functionality and further integrate computer applications with voice communications to better serve callers

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Q. What if my network goes down, will I loose voice service?
A. Converging the Voice and Data network presents the opportunity to add UPS power to the data network, ultimately increasing the overall reliability of communications. When the phones are powered using 3com Power-over-Ethernet switches, the UPS will ensure that the network and telephony system will continue to operate.

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Convergence Q&A

Q. What is Convergence?
A. Many companies maintain two separate cabling and hardware infrastructures at their facilities: Their telephone system, and their LAN. Convergence is the melding of these two separate infrastructures and technologies into one homogeneous network. This enables your telephones and computers to share the same common networking hardware.
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Q. What are the benefits of convergence?
A. There are numerous benefits to converging your voice and data infrastructures. These include:

• A converged infrastructure results in a well designed and scalable data network, therefore yielding improvements in communications reliability for both voice and networking applications.
  
• Convergence typically allows your existing IT staff to maintain both the computer network and the telephone system. This reduces response times for typical maintenance operations such as adding, moving, or changing telephone programming.
  
• When multiple sites are connected, they all share a common platform.
  
• Implementing a converged infrastructure will allow more efficient use of your telephone system by your users, which will lead to increased productivity.
  
• In a converged network, both the computer and the phone share the same Ethernet cable by utilizing the built-in 2 port switch in the phone. When wiring for a new station or an entire new facility, there is typically a 30-50% reduction in wiring costs.
  
• Remote locations and users can be linked together using a converged network, which can result in savings on long distance charges and reduce telecommunications and networking costs overall.
  

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Q. I have an existing LAN. Do I have to upgrade it to converge my infrastructure?
A. Not necessarily. Preferred Computers Systems offers a Voice Readiness Assessment. This allows us to pre-qualify your network for VoIP suitability. Recommendations will be made off of this reports.

For more information on how Valcom can tailor an IP telephony solution for you, click the button below: