IP Telephony Gains Ground

By David Baum

While BellSouth has established itself as a leader in voice and data communications, companies are now seeking vertical services in addition to basic access and transport. Topping the agenda are IP telephony solutions that leverage Voice over IP (VoIP) technologies to maximize network investments.

BellSouth is working closely with Cisco to help customers rollout comprehensive IP telephony solutions. At the heart of these solutions is Cisco AVVID (Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data), an intelligent network infrastructure that can be used to create converged business solutions--from soft client phones to IP contact centers. As part of its BellSouth® Managed Services for VoIP offering, BellSouth offers consulting, installation, maintenance and monitoring services for a wide range of customers.

"By combining voice, data and video traffic into a single unified network, organizations can lower costs, reduce toll charges and improve their returns on network equipment--all while building productivity with new types of applications," explains Mark Kaish, Vice President of Data Product Management at BellSouth. "BellSouth® Managed Services for VoIP help customers deploy these network solutions."

So far, the hottest industries include banking, health care, and education, where converged communication solutions are popular for automating employee mobility applications, call centers, and customer relationship management systems. There's a whole new world of capabilities. For example, unified messaging technologies enable users to listen to e-mail over the telephone or check voice mail messages from the Internet. "Cisco's telephony equipment, in conjunction with BellSouth network and provisioning services, provide a powerful set of solutions that grow with these customers," Kaish adds.

The market is on the upswing and shows no signs of slowing. Analysts at International Data Corp. project revenue for enterprise IP telephony services will reach $71.3 million this year and jump to almost $2.6 billion by 2007, representing a compound annual growth rate exceeding 100 percent (IDC, July 2001). Probe Research puts these changes into context, predicting that packet-based voice will account for more than one quarter of all domestic long distance traffic during that same time frame (Probe, 2002).

"The opportunities available to BellSouth and Cisco sellers are tremendous," sums up Kaish. "Already, customers are demonstrating a growing interest in converged communication solutions. Thanks to our partnership, we have access to the best IP telephony solutions in the industry."

--David Baum is an independent business writer who frequently writes about Internet Telephony.

For a complete discussion of Cisco AVVID and related IP telephony solutions, please visit
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/
779/largeent/avvid/cisco_avvid.html

Editors: Lorraine Maurice
Product Marketing Manager
Data Services
lorraine.maurice@bellsouth.com
(404) 829-7227

Ellen M. Chandra
Service Acceleration
Marketing Program Manager
echandra@cisco.com
(408) 525-6302

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