Citel is one of the prominent companies in the VoIP migration space. The company addresses a common problem: Smaller companies often have established PBX services with multiple vendors, sometimes at disparate locations. Operating a business can be exhilarating and challenging at the same time. The exhilaration comes from seeing change and progress as a result of smart decisions. Challenges come when you are playing catch-up with new technology that is still unproven and untested. One plate-shifting change for companies of all sizes is the move to IP telephony. Yet while enterprises can make a capital investment in hardware and server software, smaller companies might not be ready to dispose of old handsets and wiring geared more for data delivery.

Citel Technologies is one of the prominent companies in the VoIP migration space. The company addresses a common problem: Smaller companies often have established PBX services with multiple vendors, sometimes at disparate locations. When moving to IP-based telephony, there's a conundrum. Because the data warehousing takes place at a central location, it's often difficult and expensive to implement IP PBX across an entire company.

Hosted VoIP For SMEs

"With an internal solution, the IP PBX used to deliver the service will normally be situated at the same location as the phone users," explains Steve Towlson, the vice president of engineering at Citel. "The IP PBX would be maintained and administered by the user organization. For a hosted solution, the telephony service is provided over a wide-area data network by a carrier or service provider. The application server that is providing the telephony service would be in a location that is remote to the users and may even be in a different country or on a different continent. The service is leased from a provider and is managed by that provider remotely. So a hosted solution reduces upfront cost (no capital outlay) and offers simplified enterprise-wide voice networking because all users within an organization, regardless of geography, can use the same dialing plan, and it also reduces equipment, admin, and maintenance overheads."

Citel, based in Seattle with development labs in Canada and England, provides a hosted VoIP solution that addresses the changing climate in small and medium-sized enterprises. In recent years, VoIP has exploded in business and in the home with vendors such as Avaya leading the charge. One of the most compelling advantages is that VoIP becomes just another managed system on an internal or external server, similar to a business application or email server.

"Small businesses can now choose from a breadth of offerings from multiple IP PBX manufacturers as well as from service providers to obtain a large variety of next-generation features and functionality that were once only available to large enterprises," says Towlson. "In addition, standards-based protocols (e.g. SIP) are opening up a level of standardization and continuity previously not available between disparate vendors. This allows interoperability, which is especially important for growing enterprises that may have a number of distributed locations or who have acquired infrastructure as a result of merger or acquisition."

Because of all these choices, Towlson explains, it's not possible for companies to roll out a VoIP system gradually with both internal and hosted IP services and with connections between systems and support for previously disconnected technologies. For example, in June Citel announced that its SIP Handset Gateway is certified as compliant with Avaya Communication Manager IP telephony software. In May Citel announced compatibility and certification with Sylantro Systems hosted IP services. Citel serves as the "middle man" link between existing PBX systems and enterprise-class solutions from Avaya and Sylantro.

Array Of Choices

"Citel has fine-tuned both our product offering as well as our roadmap to offer enterprises a number of choices when migrating to VoIP, whether utilizing a premise-based IP PBX or hosted IP PBX," says Towlson. "We have also fine-tuned our offering to accommodate the hosted IP service provider community, allowing them to disrupt the traditional PBX buy cycle via their hosted offering. Secondly, we have completed interoperability with other established and emerging SIP-based IP PBX providers, including Pingtel, Zultys, and Metaswitch."

Of course, larger companies may be more interested in making the capital investment in an internal VoIP solution to replace outdated PBX systems. In some cases, hardware and wiring is outdated to the point where the benefits of one network