Voice and data networking infrastructures have historically developed along separate evolutionary paths - with completely separate networks, teams, processes, languages.
Maintaining separate infrastructure not only adds unnecessary extra costs. It also inhibits streamlined business processes and makes its own adverse contribution to the environment.
IP is now widely accepted as the universal transport protocol for enterprise communications. The advancements in security and voice over IP (VoIP) reliability and quality along with the seamless integration of new WLANs and traditional LANs have provided the technical and business impetus to converge data, video, and voice networks into a single unified infrastructure.
Voice and data convergence is the first step towards IT and communications convergence… a necessary step towards optimisation in an applications-centric world where hardware eventually becomes a commodity.
Convergence facilitates integration of multi-media communications across the range of devices and into business applications and service-oriented software voice applications.