Shell to move to global VoIP communications

Royal Dutch Shell has announced plans to shift its entire telecoms infrastructure to a VoIP based system.

Johan Krebbers, group IT architect at Royal Dutch Shell told the VoiceCon conference that the company plans to host VoIP call control, messaging, collaboration and video for more than 130 sites worldwide at three data centres in North American, Europe and Asia, Computer World reports.

"We have many different PBXs out there," the website reports Mr Krebbers as saying.

"There is not centralised management for these systems ... Five years ago, an office could have said we're not using Nortel or Alcatel or Siemens [but] that option is gone; it needs to be that way because a global company cannot afford to have a global infrastructure that is not the same."

Microsoft's Office Communications Server 2007 is not yet commercially available and was released to 2,500 IT professionals for beta testing in December last year and was released for public testing last week.

The technology giant is hoping to have a real impact on the market and by the year 2010 more than 100 million people will have the ability to make phone calls from Microsoft Office system applications such as Outlook, Word and SharePoint, the company predicts.

Microsoft predicts that the software segment of the VoIP market will be worth up to $40 billion.

Office Communications Server 2007 is the successor to Microsoft Live Communications Server 2005 and is part of Microsoft's unified communications portfolio.

"Ultimately, we don't see the need for separate IP telephony," said Mr Krebbers.

"That is our vision, but it depends on whether Microsoft delivers."