Bank of America rolling out VOIP

18.11.2006

But with 20,000 phones after nearly two years out of 180,000 expected, are you still on schedule? We are a little off pace on the schedule, but that's not contributory to the technology. It's really us making sure we have the right deployment processes and the right technology standards. We started out a little slower out of the gate to understand how to use the technology in our environment. The last thing we wanted to do was go out and just deploy technology and come back and realize that all we did was duplicate what was out there. What's out there today is 468 PBX TDM [time division multiplexer] switches. The last thing we wanted to do was create a like-for-like situation.

How many IP-PBXs or equivalents will you install? That's one of the things we're doing -- significantly reducing that physical footprint of PBXs needed to support the same number of endpoints. With PBX virtualization, it will be about a third of what we have today. It could be less.

There are some carriers and technology companies, such as IBM, that might have larger VOIP rollouts, but do you know of any others by nontechnology companies that are larger? I don't know of any project that's larger that a single enterprise is doing.

What are your overall costs? We're a bank. We don't go there. It's confidential.

EDS is doing all the installs and ongoing support? Yes.