Beyond plain teleconferencing, some companies are beginning to deploy voice-over-IP (VoIP) networks. With VoIP, voice and data travel over the same network, which allows for some useful features, such as the capability to let callers on VoIP phones connect automatically to their scheduled call instead of having to remember access numbers. As an added bonus, the quality of service over the new network is actually better than it had been with the traditional system it replaced, says Chris Duncan, global leader for e-communications technology at Midland, Mich.-based Dow Chemical.

But there are caveats with VoIP. Lewis Ward, a senior analyst with Collaborative Strategies, says that while the cost per call of voice over IP may be cheaper, building an IP network is expensive. (Duncan says the cost of Dow’s five-year project "starts with a B.") Furthermore, Ward says, packets could be bounced when calls travel over the public Internet, reassembling the speaker’s words out of order.

Data Conferencing

When you share information or applications over the public Internet, private network or an internal intranet (for example, two engineers in different offices working on the same computer-aided design file), you’re involved in a data conference. While relatively new to the market, such conferences can be ideal if the parties involved know each other well and have a set meeting agenda. Most data conferencing services have the same features, including whiteboard tools that allow users to see and work in the same file, and application sharing so that the different parties can, for example, work on the same Excel spreadsheet.

To control the information traveling over the network and negotiate better prices, a CIO should find one data conferencing vendor and decide between using a subscription-based hosted service or deploying conferencing software on company servers. There are several factors that will help you decide if you want to subscribe or buy, including usage (which controls cost), bandwidth, firewall constraints and security.

It just doesn’t make sense to buy and manage software if your employees aren’t going to use it. Mark Levitt, research director for Framingham, Mass.-based IDC (a sister company to CIO’s publisher), says about three-quarters of all data conferencing is hosted by vendors but points out that this is changing as usage grows. Since hosted services usually charge by the minute, the financial crossover point between the two is usually about a few thousand users over a year’s time.

Mary Odson, CIO of Los Angeles-based law firm Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, brought conferencing in-house because of security and control concerns. Prior to the last quarter of 1999, the firm’s attorneys would use whatever conferencing tools they saw fit, mostly hosted Web-conferencing tools, but sometimes such absurd nonbusiness tools as file-sharing services Napster and Scour. These sessions, especially the hosted services, had occasional security problems. "We had instances with Webex and Placeware when we had someone stay on those sessions," says Odson. "Someone piggybacked onto our session, hacked in and then used our account to do a series of online chats lasting four days." Odson didn’t find out about the breaches until she received the bill.