And in larger companies, phone exchanges are typically managed by the administrative department often leading to separate but parallel systems development. The culture gap between them and the IT department in big enterprises is often vast. This is held to result in savings because there's only one set of administration, infrastructure and maintenance costs. What we haven't seen is a lot of action, for a number of reasons. Much has to do with the different cultures.
Telcos are older, but more slow-moving beasts.
Here, we're accustomed to product cycles as short as three months, and continuous price competition that often means end user prices can fall drastically over a period of weeks. Other barriers include a lack of standards to glue the two systems together. IT, in contrast, is almost entirely digital and in recent years has developed a way of switching connections thousands of times a second to pump more bandwidth down the same pipe. And products designed to last little more than their amortisable lifetime of three to five years. All rights reserved.