NCR short-circuits switches

A big turn-off could be in the cards. Turning off circuit switches, that is. Although voice over IP may not yet be accepted by all, it has its fans.

Greg Albrecht, voice over IP product manager for NCR's global networks services organization, couldn't wait to turn on a voice over IP network and turn off his circuit switches.

Albrecht scoured the vendor community before crooking his finger at provider AT&T and laying out what he wants to see happen with his company's phone networks.

“NCR's networking group has been pretty proactive, and AT&T tells me we're ahead of the curve. We're usually asking for stuff before they're ready to provide it,” Albrecht said.

Albrecht wants to push the limits of software to add new features and capabilities to his company's phone services. He said he's tired of years spent handcuffed by the circuit switch hardware restrictions. VoIP brings immediate relief in cost benefits for long-distance, facilitates employee portability and will eventually allow him to consolidate different information technology departments within the company.

“We have five buildings and about 5000 employees. People move around a lot and you have to reprogram the switch when someone moves. [With the] voice over IP local phones, you can just move to your new spot and plug in, and it autoconfigures,” he said.

NCR has been tweaking its VoIP implementation with about 250 employees in Dayton, Ohio, Duluth, Ga. and Rockville, Md., Albrecht said.

Albrecht takes pride in being on the cutting edge of VoIP. “You hear everyone say ‘we're doing voice over IP’ but the truth is, it's still cooking,” he said. “The vendors are providing it to a degree, but they're still working on it.” [For more on AT&T Broadband's VoIP efforts, see page 56.]

NCR, he added, won't get left behind when the change finally comes. “We want to position ourselves where we're ready when things converge.”

Albrecht has caught the essence of what VoIP can do, said Sally Bament, vice president of marketing for Convergent Networks. “The technology does two things. It makes it cheaper for the carrier to deliver [data] and it allows the carrier to do other things beyond what, today, is embedded in a traditional circuit switch from a Nortel or a Lucent,” she said.

That could have a pretty serious impact, which is something a company such as Lucent doesn't need. It could mean that customers might stop buying Lucent switches and either wait for IP or put in what's available now. If anything, though, Lucent claims it's prepared and ready for the switch-over.

“To a certain extent, Lucent's organization is parallel to the telcos,'” said Joe Sigrist, president of Lucent's Edge Access Group. “Within Lucent you have organizations that supply circuit-switching equipment and other organizations that supply the data equipment.”

As the telcos move to data-based applications, head end, Lucent will be “able to pick up where the circuit switch side ends or stops because we have the data networking business,” Sigrist said.

Lucent will need that expertise to compete with new players like Convergent, which is aiming strictly at the softswitch and its multiple capabilities.

“The beauty of softswitch is all the smarts to do service feature and service feature development are decoupled from the switching platform. This lets the carrier or third party write an application,” Bament said.

As such, she continued, carriers are “not beholden to the large vendors anymore. It comes down to how quickly they can roll out new revenue-generating features.”

Or, in NCR's case, how many new features can be added to make it easy for employees to communicate.

“I've heard there are some companies that when an employee gets hired they give them a phone and they take that with them wherever they are,” Albrecht says. “We're not to that point yet, but….”