CHICAGO--Making IP profitable for large, medium and small enterprises was the theme at the opening general session panel at Telephony’s IP Summit held today in conjunction with Globalcomm 2006 . Panelists from cable and wireline as well as equipment manufacturers weighed in on how IP can enhance ROI as well as how service providers can use applications to their best advantage

The panel agreed that large as well as small and medium enterprises (SME) are looking to increase investment now, six to seven years after enterprises invested in equipment coinciding with Y2K. Key drivers are the globalization of the customer base, as IP technology gives greater flexibility to applications, said Eric Shepcaro, senior vice president of business development at AT&T.

Rich Grange, New Global Telecom president and CEO, said as his business caters to more of the SME space, those organizations are looking at cost as the key driver. “What is this going to cost me,” Grange said. “How easy is this going to be to manage?” He said features and apps are not driving uptake in this space.

The panel also discussed how the network transition itself is driving IP adoption. Joseph Ziskin, IBM Corp. vice president of solutions and strategy for the global telecommunications industry, said the ability to take advantage of capabilities in the network allows lower risk to service providers while increasing value to the end users.

And yet, the transition to IP-based technologies from the highly reliable legacy infrastructure may take longer than anticipated because IP is more involved, said Mark Kaish, vice president of voice product development and support for Cox Communications. However, Shepcaro said the IP environment is just as or more reliable than the circuit-switched network. The biggest challenge, he said, is determining what applications enterprises want to run and how to architect the apps’ convergence of IP and information technology support.

Many of the vendor panelists agreed that they have altered their sales approach to sell services to SME, for instance, Kaish said Cox uses more of a consultative approach to selling for these businesses. Shepcaro said SMEs don’t want to deal with multiple vendors, so the sales process has become easier.

Grange said telcos have to “bundle or die” and that telcos should take a lesson from cable and “sell value to survive, not price.”