Book Review: Cisco Frame Relay Solutions Guide

Taking Charge of Your VoIP Project Reviewer Name: Sam Chang, Sr. Network Specialist Reviewer Certification: CCNP Rating: **** out of *****

John Walker and Jeffrey Hicks’s Taking Charge of Your VoIP Project (ISBN: 1587200929, Cisco Press) is an installment in the Network Business Series line of books and covers the topic of voice over IP (VoIP) from a business strategy perspective. Although the book does cover some technical aspects of VoIP, its main purpose is to guide the reader in understanding the steps from beginning to end on how to develop a business case all the way to deploying a successful and secure VoIP deployment. The book covers eight major areas:

 VoIP Basics  Building a Business Case for VoIP  Planning for VoIP  Do It Yourself or Outsource?  Quality of Service & Tuning  Ongoing VoIP Management  Establishing VoIP SLAs  VoIP Security

This book’s primary audience is meant to be at the managerial and above levels, although it does have value for senior technical staff, albeit from a different angle. For the management level, the book’s value is in how it covers enough technical detail to make the reader aware of the complexities of VoIP, yet at the same time it presents both a business rationalization and realistic implementation steps so as not to scare the reader away (from the technology). For the senior technical staff or technical manager, the details of the technology will seem rudimentary, but the business framework may be less familiar territory, and therefore more valuable. For the technical audience, it addresses the often-asked question of, “Where’s the business need for VoIP?”

The eight categories can really be summed up into three major headings: VoIP Technology Summary, Business Justification, and Deployment Considerations. The “VoIP Basics” or technology summary provides the necessary background information on the PSTN and legacy PBX’s in order to present the context for understanding how VoIP is a change in voice technology. This section is brief, and Walker and Hicks end with a general overview of data technology and how you converge old voice technology into it, discussing signaling, transport protocols, codes, and the hardware necessary to make everything work. In terms of the business case for VoIP, the authors present three major cost savings opportunities: toll cost savings, simple network savings, and productivity savings. These areas are commonly talked about and should not be a surprise to the reader; the value here is that the book enables the reader to talk intelligently about the cost savings areas to a business audience. From here, Walker and Hicks cover how to project the ROI, how to make sure you have the data to back up your projections, and what associated costs should be considered before starting the project (e.g., is it cheaper to outsource?). Lastly, the authors spend time discussing both the pre and post implementation requirements and implications of running VoIP, spending less time on the technical details and more time on the big picture of implementing such a technology: Considering the quality requirements (i.e., QoS), integrating VoIP into a network management structure, establishing SLAs with the customer, and securing the technology.

Overall, the book provides a good, but broad treatment of how to present a case for VoIP and then deploy it. The irony of the book is that the readers who can best utilize the information will probably be the ones that find the book a little boring. For example, experienced managers will take away the unique points of implementing VoIP and recognize how it can fit in a realistic way for their particular environment. On the flip side, the knowledgeable network technician will similarly be able to see the nuances of VoIP that the book presents and understand the implications for the existing network. To both audiences, the pre-existing experience and knowledge may cause them to find the book too basic, although the lessons learned will most likely be valuable to them. To the less experienced readers (technical or managerial), the book is a great starting point and will most likely engage them more, but without additional references or resources (e.g., basic project management skills, understanding business budgeting cycles, etc.), the information learned may be just enough to make them dangerous.

Taking Charge of Your VoIP Project is a great resource for its intended audience of decision makers and project managers. It is not necessarily meant for the technical person doing the implementing, although the information is beneficial as it ties the technical to the practical.