IT managers have phoned home with their interest in Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP). According to Infonetics Research, North American VOIP service revenue rang up US$1.3 billion in 2004. Sales are expected to continue ringing up to $19.9 billion in 2009, according to the report.

Already VOIP can claim some fairly big wins. Cisco is working with integrator Prime Business Solutions to deploy 8,500 Cisco IP phones to British Airways staff at its U.K. offices and airports. The Cisco IP phones will be routed over a Cisco Ethernet network and will include Cisco"s MeetingPlace conferencing applications and Cisco CallManager call-processing software. The project is expected to be completed in the first quarter of next year.

"British Airways is confident the new IP telephony platform from Cisco and Prime will deliver benefits to our staff, making communications easier and more accessible," said Paul Coby, chief information officer at the airline.

Coby cited cost, flexibility, and functionality as reasons for moving to VOIP. "This new IP telephony system gives us the flexibility and functionality to run a busy airport terminal at significantly lower costs base than the old legacy system. In addition we now have the potential to integrate IP telephony as a means of delivering access and information to all our staff," he said.

The British Airways installation is just one more sign of the growing interest in VOIP. "IT managers are very interested in VOIP and companies are starting to integrate more and more VOIP solutions into their products at all levels," said Zeus Kerravala, Yankee Group enterprise infrastructure vice president.

Moreover, IT managers are not currently interested in futuristic solutions deployed over VOIP, he said. "They need to focus on the basic features that make IP telephones work in corporate environments," he said.

Cisco recently adopted this meat-and-potatoes approach when it introduced its Integrated Service Routers (ISRs), a mid-range product that includes VOIP capabilities.

"The new ISRs give users a lot of flexibility in terms of VOIP deployment," said Paulette Altmaier, vice president and general manager of Cisco"s premises communications business unit.  "We have advanced quality-of-service features and we support the IP communications enterprise extension. This will allow enterprises to expand their VOIP applications to branch offices," she said.

For IT managers, Altmaier said the new ISRs help extend corporate applications such as VOIP out to branch offices without sacrificing service levels. "In most cases the branch office has become an extension of the central office and IT managers want to provide the same services that they provide in the home office, such as VOIP," she said.

Cisco is hardly the only networking vendor seeking out the VOIP market. Juniper Networks recently entered into a strategic relationship with Avaya to develop converged communications solutions such as VOIP. Avaya will be part of Juniper"s enterprise Infranet model that combines network, application, and endpoint intelligence to build secure and reliable applications on a network.

Kerravala said one barrier to VOIP has been the difficulty of implementation, but that new products such as Cisco"s router have helped ease implementation of the technology. "Larger enterprises can sometimes afford big projects like this, but companies without large IT departments need a simpler, easy to manage solution," he said.

That is one of the goals of a new initiative by 3Com to enable managed service providers such as carriers and system integrators to automate key elements of implementation, service configuration, and support to reduce costs and improve service levels. The solutions include NBX products for VOIP, TippingPoint Intrusion Prevention Systems for security, and 3Com switches and routers as key infrastructure components.

Also helping IT managers are tools to prepare for the deployment of VOIP. At the recent Interop conference, Integrated Research unveiled its Prognosis VOIP and IP telephony management software designed to test the readiness of an enterprise network prior to a VOIP rollout. The application simulates VOIP traffic and monitors simulated call quality in real time, according to company officials.

Troubleshooting tools for VOIP were also on display at Interop. Fluke Networks announced a new inline network test tool, NetTool VOIP. "NetTool VOIP cuts down the time it takes to troubleshoot IP Phone deployment and close trouble tickets," Dan Klimke, marketing manager for Fluke Networks, said in a release.

While there is little doubt VOIP is going mainstream, plenty of issues remain to be solved for the technology. One of the key issues is security. The Cyber Security Industry Alliance recently asked Congress to include security recommendations for VOIP as it revises the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and the group is planning a national VOIP security test bed to address some security concerns.

Like the attack on Paris Hilton"s mobile phone that showed how that technology had finally arrived, a major attack on VOIP will probably indicate the same thing: that VOIP"s time has come.