Banking on voice over IP. How to roll out 180,000 VoIP phones?
Craig Hinkley is in the thick of a 180,000 IP-phone roll-out at Bank of America, which is replacing more than 460 PBXs with a centralised Cisco VoIP system that 6,000 US branches and back office locations. He took time out from flipping on the VoIP switch to give us a project update. The bank announced plans to roll out VoIP in 2004. How is your deployment structured, and what stage are you at? It's been going extremely well. In essence, what we've done is create three programs under our transformation umbrella: branch/retail, enterprise and call centre.
We've been moving at a steady pace on our retail branch deployment. We've also done a good number of enterprise locations this year. For our call centre deployments, we're going to go into a pilot in the next four to five weeks before the end of the year. Then we'll be ramping that program up in 2007. There are different scopes and capabilities in each of those major segments of our business. Our branch enterprise represents 6,000 stores we need to go and complete the transformation in.
We focused on that first in order to make sure we get those numbers rolling. How far along are you in that transformation? In the branches, we have around 800 stores we've converted. In our enterprise deployment, we have around 50 enterprise locations we've completed today … enterprise locations are back-office type facilities. [More than 20,000 IP phones are deployed overall]. How do you approach branch office and enterprise deployments? These must have very different requirements. Yes, that's fair to say. The standard Bank of America branch has a small number of phones, vs. a back-office location, where you might occupy one, two of five floors of a multi-tenant building with over 150 people per floor... more >>>