Six burning VoIP questions

4. Do I need a $1,000 IP phone?

Flat-screen color display . . . Gigabit Ethernet . . . Linux OS.

These aren't specs for high-end gaming PCs or enterprise network appliances . . . the features describe Siemens' OpenStage SIP-based IP telephone. While clearly aimed at the high-end user, this type of desktop IP phone reflects the growing horsepower, features and capabilities being packed into desktop IP handsets. Whether these mini-computer telephones make users more productive, or add business value to an IT deployment is debatable, some observers and users say.

"Many enterprises are dramatically overspending on desktop IP telephones," says Jeff Snyder, an analyst with Gartner. "Spending $700 to $800 on a beautiful IP phone for the desktop is serious overkill."

The reason is that many users are not yet rolling out applications that take advantage of advanced capabilities these phones provide. While some phones support Web browsers, XML and Java applications, the effort and cost of tying back-end applications and systems into an IP phone is hard to justify.

"The most common application people use on phone displays is calling up past-call lists," Snyder says. "They don't really have any enterprise applications that merit having a large color screen on the phone."

This is not to say there is no value in tying applications to IP phones with displays. Credit Valley Hospital in Mississauga, Ontario, conducted a pilot project to push corporate directory information down to more than 1,000 Nortel IP phones deployed throughout the hospital. An appliance from Citrix called the Net6 was used to convert directory data into a format that is readable and navigable by IP phone screens and interfaces. The project's aim was to allow doctors, nurses and other staff to quickly look up information when not at a PC.

The problem is that the hospital has 2,500 phones, with more than half of them being non-IP phones, or IP phones that cannot support the directory tie-in feature.

"We could not justify the extra licensing to roll out this feature to all those new IP phones," said Tim Oliwiak, the hospital's voice systems analyst at a conference earlier this year. "If we deploy a feature like this, people will become familiar with it, and it has to be everywhere." As a result, the hospital pulled back on the IP phone/directory roll out.

Gartner's Snyder says the integration of IP telephony with corporate applications and databases has real value and is an emerging trend inside databases. "By the time these types of [converged] applications become pervasive, [most] users will be accessing them through softphones on their screen" or through enterprise applications, which are tied to VoIP-based features. Salesforce.com is an example: recent tie-ins with Siemens and Cisco allow users to make calls from client record screens via a Web interface.

Getting back to the licensing issue facing the Ontario Hospital, this is something many enterprises and organizations are avoiding by choosing low-cost, generic IP phones running SIP. Part of the high costs of deploying IP phones also comes with licensing. While TDM phone systems are also licensed on a per-seat basis, other users are finding ways around these costs as they move to VoIP.

Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, uses Cisco IP phones running a generic SIP software stack, which allows the handsets to access an Asterisk IP PBX. The school had partially deployed an older-generation Cisco CallManager system, which used Cisco's proprietary "Skinny" call control protocol. This required each phone on the system to be licensed in order to register with the call server.

"The massive amounts of licensing fees required to keep the Cisco CallManager network up and running" was one of the main reasons the school went to the SIP/open source approach, says Aaron Daniel, senior voice analyst at the school. Because Asterisk is open source, this eliminates the need to license thousands of IP phones, which would have been required to run on Cisco's CallManager IP PBX.