VoIP - Where America Shops

It wasn’t long ago that most of the country had no idea what VoIP is. If you wanted to 
get anIP phone system you had to go talk with a geek at a store dedicated to selling electronic devices and computers. Even today, Voice over Internet protocol is not part of the common consumer’s lexicon, but I knew that the tide had turned to VoIP when I saw aPolycom Voice Over IP SoundStation 4000 Voice Conferencing Unit on sale at Sears. Today you can even get IP telephones and devices from Kmart. Costco offers an Ooma VoIP package that includes the handset and base as well as service with voicemail and caller ID.

While residential America begins their embrace of IP telephony, an ever-increasing number of business enterprises worldwide continue the transition to VoIP.

thinkingphones Connects Remote Workers

Sigma-Tau Pharmaceuticals based in Gaithersburg, Maryland is dedicated to the global development and commercialization of medicines for patients with rare diseases. A flexible and globally accessible unified communications (UC) solution is critical to handling Sigma-Tau’s daily communications across ongoing clinical development projects as well as commercial and manufacturing operations. The team at Sigma-Tau saw cloud-based unified communications as a good potential fit for their medical and business processes.

By moving to the cloud Sigma-Tau Pharmaceuticals could avoid the capital investment required to install a premises-based solution and still garner a mobile system with a rich feature set. They eventually opted for a solution from thinkingphones, a unified communications as a service (UCaaS) provider and a three-time Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader.

With the new solution Sigma-Tau got mobile cloud UC capabilities and powerful analytics that can provide them with overall management visibility. The thinkingphones business intelligence environment now connects all areas of their enterprise – from the front office to workers in remote global locations. The platform’s cloud analytics provide users with an at-a-glance insight into workforce behavior and activities. The thinkingphones platform is even designed to integrate with third party business applications, including customer relationship management(CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP).

With the help of their new unified business voice, text, and conferencing services Sigma-Tau Pharmaceuticals can more effectively communicate and manage their ongoing business and research. They recently added clinical development programs focused on hematological cancer and malaria.

Explosion-Proof IP Telephones

Communications can be life-critical for workers in extremely hazardous environments. Most handsets can survive a drop to the floor, but it takes some pretty serious gear to operate in the winds and rain of a hurricane or under bombardment in a warzone. Hazardous area IP phones are designed to perform when most telephones would be knocked out of commission.

Telcom & Data, a provider of business phone systems, just announced a new line of Guardian VoIP telephones expressly for industrial and hazardous environments. The phones have been certified by an independent lab that tested them in controlled situations of fire and explosion resulting from flammable gases, vapors, and liquids. All of the models tested also proved weather resistant and watertight thanks to the thermoplastic resin enclosure that protects the internal circuitry against wind, rain, and even high pressure water. The Guardian IP phone systems are Power-over-Ethernet compliant (PoE), but they can also be operated using an optional external emergency power supply.

VoIP in the Lion’s Cage

The Audubon Nature Institute is comprised of ten museums and parks that get over two million visitors every year. Their zoo has set a new standard for operations that is being followed by zoos across the country. There are no explosions at the zoo, but many of their staff work in hazardous situations - remote areas without cell signals, dealing with lions and other potentially dangerous wild animals. If there is an attack, or a potential or actual escape, the ability to communicate becomes both urgent and critical.

Two-way radios can’t reach much beyond the animal enclosures, so the zoo staff depends on their hard phone lines. To insure reliable communications Audubon opted for a ShoreTel IP phone solution and installed 500 new phones. ShoreTel’s distributed architecture ensures that there can be no single point of failure. In addition to the system’s reliability, the Audubon Nature Institute also gets ShoreTel’s other unified communications features, including conferencing, IM, mobility and online collaboration.

If you’re wondering if the move to VoIP will continue, consider this recent job posting: The New York City Housing Authority is seeking a Chief of VoIP Technology to plan, design, implement, maintain, monitor and document NYCHA’s Voice over Internet Protocol infrastructure. More than 400,000 low-income to moderate-income families and individuals live in the New York City Housing Authority’s 334 public housing developments around the five boroughs. That’s a lot of VoIP, helping people communicate. 

Posted in: sujet en anglais