With a VoIP roll out, you can expect to provide your users with a seamless and unified inbox of all their messages, be they voice, email or fax. Phone systems on the market can be integrated with CRM systems relatively easily to enhance customer experience and increase call center productivity.

Now that voice and video has come into the data side of things, you have to consider increasing and better managing your storage systems.

Email discovery rules and regulations demand that you make sure you are archiving your messaging systems, not only for litigation but for the simple task of being able to play back a user’s order for confirmation. All this digitizing of analog communications and now video takes up huge amounts of space.

Consider modularizing your storage system so you can scale up quickly to meet demand. Invest in some good storage management software (a lot of times this may come bundled with your hardware), you might have to consider virtualizing storage and now, the basic building block of storage, the hard drive is evolving as well!

Solid state drives (SSD) are out now, and offer huge MTBF (mean time before failure) numbers along with using a fraction of the energy as traditional drives. Not too far into the future, you will probably see mostly solid state drives providing you with very fast access to data and at the same time using far less power and generating almost no heat. You’ve probably already seen laptops and ultra portables with these solid state drives boasting out of this world data through put rates and quick boot up times, the major benefit to such drives will definitely be in the data center, providing quick access to your voice, video, emails, files and databases while using up much less power and requiring a fraction of energy used for cooling.