This is the fourth in a series of special reports on business continuity.

Voice-over-IP technology can play a significant role in enabling businesses to stay up and running in the face of diverse disasters, but only if those businesses have planned in advance to use the best of what’s available today.

“Businesses have to look at what would happen if they are unable to use a location or a building--whether it’s because of a bird flu outbreak, a flood or a hurricane,” said Lawrence Byrd, director of IP telephony and mobility at Avaya. “There are more options today for where people can be--a certain percentage of workers can work from home, and they can do it immediately in response to a disaster, if the business has already set up those procedures.”

Avaya, which provides VoIP gear and software, argues that businesses need to equip workers who already use laptop computers and work from home on a casual basis, with the technology needed to do it more permanently in the face of a disaster.

“Would they already have a softphone installed on the computer, would the financial services companies that need to stay up and running have included the softphone as part of the [disaster recovery] plan and would the workers involved know how to get that connected?” he said. “Business continuity is a planning exercise.”

Avaya has been working with customers to help them both develop and implement plans for how to use VoIP services to stay connected after a disaster. The good news is, the technology as it exists today allows workers to essentially re-create their office on a laptop, including a softphone interface that can incorporate presence, so other co-workers’ online status is detected, as well as contact information for customers, vendors and others needed to stay in business.

“The thing is, if you need to do this in an emergency, you need to make sure you know how to do it,” Byrd said. “And the employees need to have the proper tools.”

Avaya’s approach to the market has included developing solutions for small offices that are plug-and-play as phone peer-to-peer networks, and work with existing service provider connectivity for remote offices and potentially home offices.

The company would like to see more from service providers – who serve as a channel for Avaya products – in the way of network connections, both on the trunk side of the network and the access side.

SIP trunking services are one priority, and Avaya is testing Verizon’s new services in this area. SIP trunking enables connections to the public network for outbound calls in order to get voice services delivered over an Internet connection. It eliminates the need for separate telephone-only lines, Byrd said, and opens up a competitive dynamic on the VoIP side.

As businesses look to distribute workers, they also need more reliable service via DSL and cable modems. Most home broadband services are best-effort but service providers could well find an audience for a business level quality of service connection there, Byrd said.

“We see this for business continuity, but also for what people are calling homeshoring--distributing jobs for more contact centers in this country and allowing agents to work from home,” he said. “That kind of traffic puts stress on having good QoS on the home connection. Businesses are looking for, and might well be willing to pay for, QoS into the home to support their home workers.”

IP telephony is helping to drive new requirements and new opportunities, he added.

“Our systems create demand for thinking about new kinds of packaging and service provider offerings,” he said. “Our goal is to make our solutions available in all the places people are--mobile, small branch office, home office.”

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