The company adds, “But they want to achieve this whilst protecting their investment in existing equipment, with a low incremental setup fee and ongoing maintenance costs.
For enterprises that have made significant investments in their voice communication network, the decision to write these off in order to take advantage of ‘next generation’ applications isn’t easy.
A gateway appliance allows enterprises to enjoy the best of both worlds because it can connect existing TDM components with new IP ones. Enterprises can, therefore, leverage the investment made in their existing voice communications infrastructure and allow advantage to be taken from new IP-based applications and services.
Integrating next generation VoIP equipment, such as Aculab’s ApplianX IP Gateway, into existing TDM infrastructure opens up a wealth of possibilities. IP-based call centres can be deployed allowing for both centralised and/or distributed agents.
Centralised agents answer calls directed to them from the TDM-based PBX. However, a gateway is needed to enable the remote agents to handle calls transferred to them from the centralised application at head office. The remote agents can become available to answer calls by connecting their IP phone or soft phone to the WAN, on which the calls are carried. To truly achieve a distributed network strategy, two gateways need to be deployed. A second gateway could enable calls to be transferred to a secondary call centre or regional office, as required. Both scenarios provide more cost effective and flexible ways for enterprises to manage operations and service customers.”