SV VoIP Best Practices Whitepaper FINAL

8/6/2019 SV VoIP Best Practices Whitepaper FINAL

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Best Practices for

VoIP Service Providers


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www.starviewsolutions.com

How the IP Telephony Market Has Evolved

Hosted IP telephony in the U.S. market continues to grow, but remains a business that many

would argue has not yet achieved its potential, or reasons largely within the industrys control. In

act, according to IDC, the U.S. hosted IP telephony and hosted unied communications markets

represent an annual services revenue stream o a bit more than $500 million.

Hosted IP telephone revenue in the U.S. market might reach a $1 billion level by 2014, according

to IDC, while hosted UC contributes about $400 million in annual revenue.

Still, IP telephony adoption by small and mid-sized businesses has increased dramatically between

2008 and 2010, rom 17 percent o respondents in 2008 to 27 percent o respondents in 2010,an increase o 59 percent among small and mid-sized companies, according to Consultant Dan

Sachar o Inzenka.

Up to this point, however, adoption has been heaviest among organizations with more than

100 employees. That suggests the biggest opportunity is among rms with 20 to 50 employees,

Inzenka suggests.

IP telephony adoption also is almost twice as high or companies with more than one business

location, says Inzenka. Single location companies are 26 percent less likely to have switched to IP

telephony.

About two thirds o respondents at rms with 20

to 100 employees say they are likely to adopt IP

telephony within the next two years, said Sachar.

[R1]

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There remain signs that buyers still are not completely sold on the advantages o hosted IPtelephony. A recent Forrester Research survey o 567 enterprise and smaller business users

that already have adopted IP telephony shows that most buyers so ar have chosen premises-

based solutions.

Just 4 percent o respondents say they have adopted a hosted IP telephony service. Another 4

percent reported they had adopted a telephony-as-a-service solution. About 5 percent said their

IP telephony solution was outsourced. Taking all three as a group, just 13 percent o IP telephony

solutions were hosted, cloud-based or outsourced.

U.S. Hosted VoIP & Hosted UCServices Revenues ($M)

$1,500

$1,000

$500

$0

2010 2014

Hosted VoIP

Hosted UCSource IDC

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In part, those results likely are colored by the act that Forrester Research mostly advises enterprises,

not small businesses, and the economics o IP telephony are such that enterprises oten can justiy

owning their own solutions, rather than using hosted solutions.

Forrester Research denes an enterprise as any entity with 1,000 or more employees, while a small

or medium business is dened as an entity with 20 to 999 employees. [R2]

That study lends credence to the cable operator strategy o targeting businesses with 20 or ewer

employees, as those are the venues where the economics o buying a service are best, compared

to buying a premises-based solution.

It seems clear enough that IP telephony is poised or more growth. Digital voice will be the astest

growing U.S. industry in the next 5 years, growing at a 17 percent compound annual growth rate

through 2016, according to IBISWorld. [R3]

About 20 percent o that growth will be driven by business customers. So the issue is how

to accelerate the sales trend overall, and how to shit more o the potential market to

hosted approaches.

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VoIP User and Provider Trends

There are signs that many business customers are both more knowledgeable about IP telephony

than they were three years ago, while at the same time many customers remain conused about IP

telephony advantages and eatures. A good estimate is that mid-sized as well as larger businesses

and enterprises have gotten quite sophisticated about total cost o ownership and understand the

IP telephony proposition well, while many small business managers do not.

Among other key trends, perhaps 19 percent o IP telephony customers in the SMB space say

converged access is the type o VoIP in use. That includes SIP trunking and other orms o access

used to support voice services, the latest Inzenka survey ound. Nearly hal o respondents to

Inzenkas survey say they use premises IP phone systems, while 33 percent o respondents saythey use hosted IP telephony.

At the same time, the service provider IP telephony opportunity spans rom access to unied

communications and telepresence solutions.

Source: IDC

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Over 50 percent o IP telephony purchases are done through the channel, but 40 percent o

SMB prospects also cite the Internet as their main source o product inormation. An unknown

at this point is the impact cloud services will have to existing channels, especially when voice

communications is bundled with other cloud-based applications, says Inzenka.

Aside rom targeting organizations with 20 to 50 users, hosted service providers also should be

looking to customize their oerings or industry verticals, and should be bundling other products,

especially phones, said Sachar. Bundles are very popular.

Step one typically is a voice plus data access bundle, but IP phones were surprisingly popular

items and customers wanted bundled as well, Sachar said. Security and email services also were

high on wish lists or products in a logical bundle.

But the other important change, compared to 5 years ago, is the nearly universal value o mobile

integration with the business phone service. About 70 percent o executives running rms with 20to 50 employees wanted mobile integration with their hosted IP telephony service, Inzenka said.

But the SMB hosted PBX business is changing in other ways as well. Voice services are shiting

to mobile devices, and away rom desktop phones. For the immediate uture, desk phones will

remain an indispensable part o the work place, says consultant Jon Arnold. [R4]

The other signicant trend is that voice is less important as a communications channel. Email,

instant messaging, text messaging, and even social networks, blogs and wikis are displacing or

augmenting voice communications.

Voice is no longer the center o communications, said Arnold. IP voice is less expensive than legacy

voice, but the larger point is that voice now has to compete with other communications modes.

That might suggest that those related communication services, where

possible, could be logical parts o an SMB service bundle. Eventually,

other cloud-based business applications might be logical additions

as well.

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Behind the Scenes

What it takes to have a VoIP service and the dierent types o back ofce hardware/

sotware that is commonly being used.

There are many more elements to provision and while most elements have much more power and

exibility than their legacy elements, that also means more conguration choices. [R5]

Pain points can occur at any number o elements, ranging rom integrated access devices to

integration with on-site phone systems. Then there are

session border controllers and multiple application servers

to congure, ranging rom basic telephony eatures to

messaging or email servers.

Redirect servers, gateways and sotswitches, plus numbering

servers are also part o the delivery system. In addition, as

more customers have asked or integration o the voice system

with customer relationship management or other business

applications, those servers also have to be congured.

Furthermore, there arguably is more variation o oers as IP telephony providers try to dierentiate

rom other competitors, and as the number o eatures and related products oered in a bundle

has grown.

Flow-through provisioning or IP telephony that really is zero-touch requires streamlining

interactions with operational support systems and billing systems, not just core network processes.

E911, LSR, LIDB, LNP and PIC/CARE unctions must be handled either directly or through clearing

houses such as Neustar and VeriSign.

For all these reasons, provisioning o IP telephony services oten is more complex than it

sometimes appears. Whether hosted or premises-based, IP telephony is a mix o voice subsystem

and data inrastructure issues, plus external signaling and trafc routing to and rom external

servers, gateways and switches, ollowed by communication and synchronization with billing and

operations systems.

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Best practices in advance o provisioning will involve conducting an audit o existing technology

including the cabling inrastructure, the network architecture, degree o redundancy,

uninterruptible power and security requirements, and policy management or multiple types o

trafc. [R6]

The perormance o IP phones, voice gateways, call managers and IP PBXs, routers, switches, hubs,

servers and client machines all can aect perormance.

The VOIP network is highly reliant on how well your data network is perorming, says Garrick

Sobeski, manager o networks at The Institute or Transusion Medicine, Pittsburgh. [R7]

But most o those best practices only deal with the ability to support high-quality voice on the

local and private data networks.

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Taming the Monster

How to corral all o the back ofce services to become more efcient, save money, and

make money.

In a recent round o mystery shopping calls to hosted IP telephony

service providers, management consultancy Inzenka ound that some

providers were quoting install intervals o up to 8 weeks, even or

relatively simple installations or small businesses.

You might wonder whether provisioning intervals are this long simply

because sales orces do not have quoting tools, but that will strike most

observers as improbable. It is more likely that a 2-month delay rom

order to install is caused by provisioning inefciency, the inability toprocess an order with simple ow through processes.

One might argue that the industrys state-o-the-art provisioning has

improved dramatically rom 2007. Any search on IP telephony or VoIP

provisioning would return results suggesting that provisioning was a bigger issue in 2005 and

2006 than it is in 2011. In some respects that is true,. But challenges remain i the Inzenka shopping

exercise is any indication.

Are there any o-the-shel systems that can solve all o these problems? The answer is kind o.

The problem is that there is no one carrier alike in the industry, and they all require airly extreme

customization o any o-the-shel back ofce systems that they purchase. This has created a huge

industry o proessional services organizations and carriers spending ar more than budgeted on

their back ofce systems. What ends up happening in most cases is carriers have to adapt their

business rules to the systems they purchase, because it seems that even with proessional systems

customizations, the purchased platorms are still limited or do not tie in that well to other existing

systems.

What is necessary or these expensive problems to be solved is to extract the business rules and

services logic rom the network and switching elements themselves, and move them to a commonplatorm where they can be established at a more logical layer. Such a system would have to

remain agnostic to the underlying inrastructure in order to keep the business rules and workows

consistent with the business itsel, and not at the mercy o equipment vendors and the way they

think services should be established and managed.

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Integration with network elements, other systems, and providers will be the biggest challenge.

For a system that manages all o the business rules and workows, however, a plugin interace or

each system or provider needing to be integrated would serve as the API or a respective provider

or system. This would allow the workows and business rules to be directly translated to the API

o the integrated system or provider. Since this architecture would maintain the business rules, itwould provide one common API to the users or even customers o the carrier using the platorm.

System or provider APIs could be changed on the back-end in the plugin interace without

modication o the customer-acing API. That is huge.

As a wholesale SIP carrier, StarView Solutions provides everything rom wholesale SIP, LD and

origination to channel-driven hosted PBX and SIP trunks. Like all providers, StarView was challenged

with not only the provisioning o these complex services, but also billing, CDR centralization, and

dealing with multiple providers or DID, toll-ree origination, e911 and termination. Another issue

that presented itsel was that StarView wanted to white label its services to other carriers who did

not have an inrastructure o their own. With all o the providers and multiple systems involved

to make StarViews services work, oering a simple end-to-end solution was a difcult problem to

solve.

StarViews answer is PRISM, which stands or PRovisioning and Integraded Services Management.

PRISM was designed with other carriers in mind, rom a white label perspective, providing a single

API to the multitude o services that StarView oers. PRISM also oers a web portal providing all

o the same unctionality as the API. What makes PRISM so unique is its hierarchical design so thatwhite label resellers may also have white label resellers o their own. Also, i a carrier wishes to use

PRISM, it can maintain its current vendor relationships and use PRISM as the API integration into

those vendors. PRISM can be as integrated as deeply as a carrier would need to efciently manage

the many elements required to run a competitive successul service provider business.


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About StarView & PRISM

StarView Solutions, based in Austin, Texas, is an industry leader o providing business-ready

Unied Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solutions to both enterprise business customersand wholesale carriers throughout the U.S. StarViews services include converged voice and data

packages, hosted PBX, SIP trunks, network monitoring, diagnosis and event management, private

line and multi-site MPLS connections, ax-to-email services, toll-ree numbers, and wholesale

carrier termination. The company has several VoIP tools that include istarsip 3.0, the rst native

SIP/VoIP application in the Apple Store and PRISM, a cloud-based service activation platorm and

integrated web services gateway or VoIP service providers. For more inormation, visit www.

starviewsolutions.com.

PRISM is a multi-tenant Service Broker System that allows complete service modularity o the

core services necessary to provision just about all aspects o VoIP service. The goal o PRISM is to

provide all o the core services necessary to provision and manage all o the unctionality that a

VoIP service provider would require to do business. This Service Delivery Application seamlessly

integrates with existing inrastructure while consolidating OSS data and workows.

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http://www.starviewsolutions.com/http://www.starviewsolutions.com/http://www.starviewsolutions.com/http://www.starviewsolutions.com/


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References

[R1] http://ipcommunications.tmcnet.com/topics/ip-communications/

articles/173275-ip-telephony-remains-an-education-job-small-business.htm

[R2] http://www.carrierevolution.com/articles/204776/orrester-nds-most-

enterprises-still-buy-phone-s/

[R3] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/the-astest-growing-

industry-in-the-country-its-digital-voice/239087/

[R4] http://www.ocus.com/bries/small-business/2011-two-key-telecom-trends-

smbs/

[R5] http://www.leonidsystems.com/doc/SysDevBestPractices.pd

[R6] http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/77629/VOIP_Best_Practices

[R7] http://howto.techworld.com/networking/2628/case-study-managing-voip-

eectively/?intcmp=ros-md-hwt
http://ipcommunications.tmcnet.com/topics/ip-communications/articles/173275-ip-telephony-remains-an-education-job-small-business.htmhttp://ipcommunications.tmcnet.com/topics/ip-communications/articles/173275-ip-telephony-remains-an-education-job-small-business.htmhttp://www.carrierevolution.com/articles/204776/forrester-finds-most-enterprises-still-buy-phone-s/http://www.carrierevolution.com/articles/204776/forrester-finds-most-enterprises-still-buy-phone-s/http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/the-fastest-growing-industry-in-the-country-its-digital-voice/239087/http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/the-fastest-growing-industry-in-the-country-its-digital-voice/239087/http://www.leonidsystems.com/doc/SysDevBestPractices.pdfhttp://www.computerworld.com/s/article/77629/VOIP_Best_Practiceshttp://howto.techworld.com/networking/2628/case-study-managing-voip-effectively/?intcmp=ros-md-hwthttp://howto.techworld.com/networking/2628/case-study-managing-voip-effectively/?intcmp=ros-md-hwthttp://howto.techworld.com/networking/2628/case-study-managing-voip-effectively/?intcmp=ros-md-hwthttp://howto.techworld.com/networking/2628/case-study-managing-voip-effectively/?intcmp=ros-md-hwthttp://www.computerworld.com/s/article/77629/VOIP_Best_Practiceshttp://www.leonidsystems.com/doc/SysDevBestPractices.pdfhttp://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/the-fastest-growing-industry-in-the-country-its-digital-voice/239087/http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/the-fastest-growing-industry-in-the-country-its-digital-voice/239087/http://www.carrierevolution.com/articles/204776/forrester-finds-most-enterprises-still-buy-phone-s/http://www.carrierevolution.com/articles/204776/forrester-finds-most-enterprises-still-buy-phone-s/http://ipcommunications.tmcnet.com/topics/ip-communications/articles/173275-ip-telephony-remains-an-education-job-small-business.htmhttp://ipcommunications.tmcnet.com/topics/ip-communications/articles/173275-ip-telephony-remains-an-education-job-small-business.htm

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