Survivable Branch Appliances

So far, we’ve brought your entire customer’s organization into the unified communications world.

But what about businesses that have many branch or remote offices – retail locations, bank, insurance companies and others that are spread out over the country or even the world?

In this penultimate step, we bring those remote offices into the scope of the solution. What these remote locations need is the ability to get through to Lync and use SIP phones and trunking, but with some back-up survivable trunking to make sure they’re not taken down by outages. We’ve worked closely with Microsoft to create a line Survivable Branch Appliances (SBAs) that do just this job.

Our SBA lineup comes in 30-, 120- and 480-port versions, and includes all of the unified communications functionality we’ve talk about in the six steps leading to this one. AudioCodes SBAs take care of data (routing, WAN termination, firewall), voice (secured SIP trunking through enterprise-class session border controller) and advanced applications like support for SIP phones, smartphone integration and passive recording through Lync.

And it does all that in one neat box that can be easily tucked away in a branch office’s wiring closet. That makes it easy for your to deploy and install even for companies with a large number of small branches, keeps acquisition and installation costs to a miniumum, and keeps the crowded wiring closet clean, replacing a handful of different boxes that need to be powered and connected with one appliance.

So we’ve now taken care of unified communications just about everywhere your customers work. Except maybe Starbucks. In the modern work world, more people are road warriors more often, so having a mobility component to your unified communications strategy is truly crucial. In the eighth and final step to this guide, we’ll put a cherry on top of this UC deployment by adding mobility features.

Continue reading to Step 8 >>