In two separate announcements made this morning, Verizon Business introduced capabilities that will make it easier for enterprise customers to use its voice-over-IP services.

By expanding the IP trunking options for enterprises, Verizon will allow them to make maximum use of bandwidth across their networks, use a broader range of IP PBXs and do automated re-routing of calls for business continuity. In addition, Verizon Business will now support managed IP PBX services including the Nortel IP Telephony platform, in addition to the Cisco Systems platform it already supports.

Enterprise customers are increasingly looking to integrate their voice services onto their IP networks, but that is also adding a degree of complexity to their operations, said Laurie Shook, manager of Managed Internet Telephony Product Marketing for Verizon Business. With the latest announcements, Verizon is hoping to make the transition easier and also to add flexibility while maintaining reliability, she said.

“The managed PBX offering makes sense for large enterprise customers and multi-location customers in particular because we can remotely manage all the various distributed sites,” she said. “We can managed the security bulletins and patches for the IP PBX, and manage down time as well. When you have a VoIP network and IP on top of that, the problem may not be within the voice applications. It may be a problem with the wide area network. By using a managed service provider who has visibility to the PBX, the LAN and the WAN, you can dramatically reduce time needed to troubleshoot and hopefully identify problems before they become service-affecting.”

The new IP trunking capabilities include Burstable Enterprise Shared Trunks, or BEST, which provides “unprecedented design flexibility” for Verizon Business customers, said Karen Gergelyi, product marketing manager for IP Trunking.

“Most customers today already have the ability to aggregate long-distance traffic into a hub, but they have not been able to crack the code for local,” she said. “They have to provision trunks or DIDs and gateways. With BEST, our customers can n
ow can share simultaneous calls across their enterprise. If there is idle concurrent call [capacity], their data traffic can burst up to use that idle bandwidth. If a customer has sites on the East Coast, where the busiest hours are between 10 a.m. and noon, they can borrow or use concurrent calls that aren’t being used by sister locations in the Pacific time zone. In the end, the customer has to provision less trunks across the enterprise.”

The service doesn’t cost customers more, she said. In fact, most customers save money by using existing bandwidth more efficiently.

Verizon also is offering Ethernet as a path to VoIP, recognizing that many enterprise customers are using Ethernet as a WAN technology or as access to a corporate MPLS network, Gergelyi said. “Customers can take advantage of the flexibility of Ethernet network design, and they can save money using Ethernet as the transition path.”

Inbound Failover, another new features, lets customers automatically forward calls to another IP address if service to one site is disrupted for any reason. “The service automatically detects IP failures and re-routes inbound calls, so you don’t have to go through a time-consuming manual process,” she said. “Traffic is evenly distributed using in-bound load-balancing.”

Verizon plans to continue its VoIP expansion in 2008, including global additions to its VoIP footprint.