Voice conversations have gone into another dimension with voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). Known by many names, including IP telephony, Internet telephony and voice over broadband, VoIP connects people through the Internet or any IP-based network rather than over traditional phone lines.

The evolution to VoIP has enabled a potential benefit for the data warehouse environment—rather than mining information and analyzing data only from data networks, business activity conducted over the phones can now be part of the overall data warehouse repository. Phone calls and videoconferencing sessions, essentially, are like e-mail and other unstructured data that can be captured, stored, analyzed and mined for relevant information.

For organizations leveraging data warehouses, this transition could be a boon, since better-captured information from multiple sources can be used to greater effectiveness. For example, customer data from e-mails and online support pages can sync with VoIP-generated support calls, giving companies a fuller picture of customer needs, leading to more advanced marketing strategies and product development directions, better communication tactics and richer collaboration among different departments.

As many companies have discovered, information is power, and VoIP can increase that power by bringing in a whole new stream of data that can connect with other data within the same warehouse environment. Data warehousing, in other words, will not simply be a method for collecting data secured through phone calls, but rather a backbone for a company's entire data strategy.

The advantages of VoIP
Although VoIP has the potential to be a significant data collection point, the main driver for VoIP adoption so far has been cost. Organizations are attracted to the promise of lower prices for telephony, since calls routed over the Internet do not include conventional long-distance fees or the type of taxes and service charges that are often part of a traditional telephone bill.

In addition to lower costs for operation, VoIP has benefited from increased competition among vendors, which in turn have developed more advanced services. As this continues, it will allow organizations to integrate application, infrastructure and communications environments.

VoIP also has the advantage of leading IT to take a hard look at its current network setups. To make VoIP more reliable, many companies have had to increase redundancy, put more backup servers in regional offices, buy network equipment with multiple access paths and invest in hosted options. Although these might represent larger up-front costs, the networks become more robust during the process, since they run more efficiently, offer improved backup capabilities and often address important power and cooling issues that come from implementation of high-density servers.

While it may seem that power and cooling costs would increase rather than decrease when servers are added at regional offices, increasing efficiency allows companies to add high density without suffering a budget hit. Also, better network design eliminates older equipment that is still running but is not vital to the network, so power and cooling shuttled to that equipment can be delivered to newer components.

Most importantly for the data warehouse environment, voice services can now be linked to other data streams and stored and analyzed accordingly. Currently, the number of applications is limited, but the market is growing along with demand, and new features could make capturing and analyzing voice easier. Most products in the area can embed voice into business logic and applications, allowing it to be manipulated like any other piece of data.

As the market grows, so too do the features offered by VoIP. Most significantly, VoIP can now be used in wireless environments, a particularly crucial innovation given the amount of wireless technology in many enterprise setups. VoIP is also latency-sensitive and can record data in real time, with automatic data backup feeding the voice-generated information into a system.

Challenges and support issues
Like any data collection point, VoIP is not immune from hackers, and concerns have been raised in the past about its security. But in the same way other security threats have been addressed, the developer community and VoIP vendors have tackled the issue with encryption. Several encryption products are available, and some VoIP providers have encryption already built into their services.

Although VoIP has come a long way toward getting past the hype cycle and into mainstream implementations, some challenges remain for IT departments. Not all telco service providers support the same IP PBX (central company switchboard) manufacturers, so a company's central telephony platform could have equipment that does not mesh with its telco provider.

Some companies that have hosted IP services could also encounter difficulties, since some providers have been slow to deploy new hosted VoIP features, such as cellular extensions.

One way to ensure more interoperability is to look for VoIP-specific service level agreements and talk with vendors to determine how their products and services play together. Vendors should be able to articulate how their offerings work with other products in the marketplace.

Another current challenge is in the capabilities provided by wireless networks. While VoIP can now be used in wireless environments, IT departments could find that these providers do not deploy enough standard backup and overflow capabilities. However, many wireless providers are currently working to introduce technology like IP automatic call distributors that can work well within an enterprise environment.

Also, the growing popularity in the consumer market of wireless VoIP network (sometimes called VoWLAN) handsets—basically, devices that can access voice and data services—is driving more mobile VoIP use for businesspeople. This introduces a new set of challenges around converged technology. Not only do IT departments have to weave VoIP into their environments, but they also have to ponder how device use fits in. Experts have noted that one solution is to standardize, giving users the same brand of device rather than allowing multiple brands with multiple carriers, and to integrate VoIP support into service and support agreements.

Wide-ranging impact
VoIP's impact on the enterprise can be substantial, from helping to initiate a network revamp to refining how and what data is collected to creating a cohesive data storage and analysis strategy. Although it also happens to replace a phone system nicely, it is far more powerful and multi-featured than a phone system could ever be. T

Elizabeth Millard lives in Minneapolis and writes about business and technology.

Photography by iStockphoto

Teradata Magazine-June 2008