Finance companies lead way with IP telephony

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The financial sector is a long way ahead of other industries when it comes to adopting Internet Protocol Telephony (IPT) technology.

Nearly all (94 per cent) of finance companies have an IPT solution in place compared to the UK average of 80 per cent, according to a survey by the SAS Group.

Finance companies are also eager to go forward with their communications strategies, with 69 per cent planning to implement unified communications (UC) in the near future.

"It is interesting to see that financial organisations are wise to the benefits of IPT, as they don't tend to be early adopters of technology," said Charles Davis, chief executive of the SAS Group.

Although the financial sector was praised for their speed, worries were raised that 63 per cent were using internet-based Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) which did not support quality of service (QoS) monitoring.

The researchers raised the fact that QoS was the only way to guarantee voice, video and mission critical data applications such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP).

"Failure to properly maintain QoS can have serious repercussions for IPT and unified communications," said Davis.

"The addition of just poorly configured device can obliterate the QoS of an entire network, and put critical applications like voice out of action," he said. "The financial sector clearly has some work to do to ensure it is properly utilising these technologies to their potential."

The SAS Group claimed that QoS problems would be particularly detrimental to businesses with large numbers of mobile workers as it would cause problems to voice over wireless and mobile networks.

The financial sector would be particularly hit, as 63 percent of financial companies had more than 200 staff. Of these, 80 per cent had more than 1000.

IT PRO has recently reported about how Mitsubishi had saved thousands of pounds by installing IP telephony.