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Business blog
Mumbai's 8/11 prompts West to co-ordinate security
Mumbai's 8/11 is emblematic of a lack of security co-ordination across city, national and private sector organisations. M Institute co-founder Jyoti Banerjee examines the lessons that the West can learn from Mumbai's 8/11.
Understanding M
Mid-size enterprises are the powerhouse of the UK economy.
Despite their sterling performance, mid-size enterprises are nearly invisible.
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Vocal responses: Is VoIP living up to expectations?
The first wave of voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) implementations is complete, but have they lived up to expectations? What can be learnt from the early adopters?
The proposition is simple: why purchase and maintain two networks when one will do?
Treating voice calls as just another form of data to be moved around the IP network slashes the cost of calls, while making call handling more flexible and intelligent. 85% of UK companies have already embarked on VoIP implementations or intend to do so by 2009, but the technology is not without its drawbacks. Sound quality is often poor - an issue which vendors will attribute to teething problems, but a report by VoIP testing company Brix Networks finds that call quality has actually fallen since 2004.
As some of the early adopters have learned, the conversion to VoIP technology also has a great impact on IT infrastructure. In many cases, companies have just not been prepared for VoIP implementations. According to Chad Agate, president of US-based VoIP services company SIPbox, testing and modelling is the key, and companies should take a 'readiness test' before switching to VoIP. Once VoIP is installed, performance monitoring tools are needed to ensure that the infrastructure can handle the VoIP traffic.
Overall, businesses have found the transition to VoIP advantageous: costs have been reduced and the flexibility and functionality of the comms network have improved. However, the experiences of the early adopters would seem to display a need for prudence.
To read the complete article, please check out Vocal Responses on the Information Age website.
