Have you ever walked into work on a Monday morning and found this fancy new digital phone on your desk? Well if you have (and the odds are increasing fast), then I am guessing that it is unlikely that you stopped for a second to think about what was actually involved in getting it there. Hopefully you have not begun your Business VoIP experience by cursing the phone because you are having trouble using all the features. As such I hope you received proper training as to how to use the nifty new features that a Business VoIP system can provide.
Having installed a bunch of these systems in various sized organizations across the country, I thought that someone may be interested in the high level process of what is involved in transitioning a business from a legacy analog phone system to a new VoIP system. Who the heck does these installations anyway? Well it is extremely unlikely that a Cisco or an Avaya will actually do the installation for you. These companies will fight tooth and nail to convince you to purchase its voip solution, but after that, there is very little involvement from them. Unless of course you are part of a large enterprise which can demand and receive direct support.
So in the majority of cases a partner (e.g. 
 ) of these companies will actually perform the installation and manage the entire VoIP project. These partners are more commonly known as VARs or Value Added Resellers and are pretty much made up of a bunch a sales guys and a group of engineers specializing in various technologies such as telephony, security, wireless, etc. It is these engineers that actually do the installation, with the VAR charging the end customer anywhere between $150 and $250 an hour for its services. Now that has got your attention, hasn’t it? Yes, there is a lot of money to be made through VoIP. If only the poor engineer got paid that much. Well actually, a good VoIP engineer who can design and deploy an entire Business VoIP solution, will typically earn well over $100K per year in most parts of the country.
Next week I’ll go into some more detail on the actual process that companies go through when swapping over to Business VoIP .
Tony
