Only a couple of years ago, for many enterprises EPABX was just a voice switch and nothing else. Well that was then, not any more. There has been a fundamental change in the way an enterprise views an EPABX today. Ditto for the position that an EPABX commands within an enterprise. Voice is not dead but an EPABX today is in many ways a strategic tool for any business. Many enterprises rely on it for adding competitive advantages to their business. In fact, the name EPABX too has become a misnomer. After all, apart from voice, it also facilitates data and video communication. In other words, it is the protagonist that is making convergence possible in enterprises. However, the world has not found a better and more appropriate term for the box that resides at the reception of most enterprises.

Technology Options
The major technology trends that enterprise can look forward to in a PBX are support for open architecture-server based platform; support for open OS like Linux, inter-operability with legacy and multi vendors over open standards; VoIP support (H323, SIP) and integration of converged applications like UMS.

IP Is Here, and It’s the Future: IP-enabled and pure IP voice and data switches are the talk of the town. While an IP-enabled EPABX is basically a circuit switch with an IP interface, a pure IP EPABX is designed based on an IP platform. While both can enable VoIP, the former would permit a limited number of communication channels over IP and would require an intervening operator. Also, adding an IP line card into the EPABX shelf would offer no real advantage since all the drawbacks of the existing TDM platform of the EPABX, viz. limited scalability, high cost of integration and high administration and management costs remain.

On the other hand, a pure IP-based platform would incorporate RAS functionality and will allocate a unique IP address for each telephone, thereby permitting free and transparent connectivity with the IP world, with the need for an intervening operator. The key point here is that IP offers unlimited functionality and applications that an enterprise would surely need for achieving its business goals more efficiently and cost-effectively. For example, an IP EPABX would allow companies to do such things as video-conferencing and unified messaging from a single platform. More importantly, upgrades are easy and less costly on nonproprietary, open-standard platforms, on which IP-EPABXs are based, unlike the traditional switches that rely on vendor-owned closed and proprietary standards. This essentially means that if an enterprise wants to integrate new applications into the solution, it can always look for any vendor. On the other hand, the traditional EPABX, with their closed and proprietary architecture, bind the user to one vendor for all adds and changes.

Going the IP way is giving organizations a competitive edge over their competitors. Even though initial investments are still high, IP does help in reducing costs by offering single network advantage from day one, leveraging existing WAN for intra office traffic, lower costs of moves adds and changes and management. Moreover, it can also facilitate a truly mobile enterprise as it enables employees to access applications and full functionalities from anywhere in the world. IP also offers better disaster management capabilities that can ensure business continuity in case of a disaster.

Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT): Mobility is another area where the voice communication has evolved. Today, in a cost optimization environment, ‘employee movement’, ‘reachability anywhere’, and ‘any time’ has become a bigger necessity. The voice communication servers today offer these solutions using DECT technology. This has made the user to move around within the premises at his will and still be in touch with the rest of the world and enjoy latest features set.

Computer Telephony Integration (CTI): CTI offers revolutionary change in the desktop tools available to the user. Today, enterprises are moving towards implementing customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM) applications to enable the organization to perform efficiently and handle customers with utmost care. Using CTI, Telephony is integrated with any of the applications listed above to provide a unified window to the users, so that they can perform all their telephony and application related tasks using click of a mouse. Now the users are able to concentrate more on their work than learning how the telephone or any other communication tool works.

Unified Messaging: Unified messaging has revolutionized the mail handling in the enterprise, be it voicemail, faxmail or even e-mail. Unified messaging aims at providing a unified management of all sorts of mails through a single storage and management , making the system administrator’s life easier, and at the same time providing one single client window to the users to access any of their mails. Using the familiar window to access all his mails including voice, fax or e-mails, has made it easier for the users to send , receive, and archive the mails. Using text to speech (TTS) and speech recognition technologies, the unified messaging solutions are able to deliver the messages any where, any time on various media including Web, landline or on a mobile.