
Unified Communications
Telecommunications, IP Telephony, and Internet Services
PRI/TDM vs. SIP/VoIP
Traditional telephony services based on time division multiplexing (TDM) and primary rate interface (PRI) still have widespread utilization in businesses. Designed before contemporary server technology, TDM private branch exchanges (PBX) were based on proprietary hardware solutions that interfaced with analog and TDM-based telephone lines (e.g. T1 and T3 circuits). As of 2015, approximately 64% of businesses are still using TDM-based telephony solutions, due to their reliability and the cost associated with replacing them.
VoIP offers inherent benefits over TDM as it enables business to migrate away from proprietary TDM equipment, saving cost, increasing portability of services (an IP phone can be connected to any Internet/LAN connection), and increasing the types of services and their integration. These expanded services are possible due to session initiated protocol (SIP) trunking where the VoIP services uses the Internet in place of a traditional telephone trunk.
DSC works with both TDM and VoIP solutions for supporting businesses of all sizes and no one solution will meet everyone’s needs. DSC can also help companies looking to make a migration from TDM to SIP by not only helping with the infrastructure changes, but also the cost analysis for determining the potential SIP savings over PRI/TDM.
Unified Communications
Unified Communications offers a straight-forward benefit for virtually any business. In older business models, businesses were centered around their headquarters and other office operations. In today environment, business is mobile and businesses are out on the street engaging their customers vs. the businesses bringing their customers to them. As such, mobile devices like smartphones, tablets and laptops have become critical platforms for conducting business. However, the platform alone is insufficient – it is the tools enabled by the platform that offer the critical business benefits: email, instant messenging, SMS texting, CRM, secured electronic communications, etc. However, the increase in tools for communications can also have its drawbacks. If critical communications are distributed across multiple platforms, then locating the information you need and re-purposing the information can become burden by the technology. Finding critical communications for contract negotiations, legal actions, sales follow-up calls, etc. can be complicated exponentially by the volume of tools and services that you’re using as part of your business communication solutions. Finally, beyond day-to-day usage, the impact of these tools and services on other critical systems and events, such as disaster recovery, has to be considered.
The power of modern communication tools and services aren’t truly realized until they are unified and are able to inter-operate. DSC specializes in not only identifying effective business communication and information management tools, but also in how these tools can be operated within a common unified communication platform to facilitate information searching, sharing, and re-purposing while maintaining critical compliance with applicable security requirements like HIPPA and AML/FDIC regulations by ensuring that your data is only available to those that should have access. Increase efficiency & reduce your costs with a unified communication platform that will enhance your business’s communication, collaboration & productivity.