All mod comms

This report is in association with Vodafone

In an industry noted for meaningless buzzwords and tortuously contrived acronyms, unified communications (UC) is a rare example of a term that does exactly what it says.

UC takes all forms of office-based communications – voice, video and data – and ports them onto a single application or software platform that gives workers the ability to choose one or other from a single desktop interface.

With so many elements under its control, UC software can also make an intelligent decision about how to establish a communications session between two users. Based on real-time “presence” information that indicates whether or not the person on the other end of the line is free to take a phone call, establish a videoconferencing session or receive an email, for example, this capability can have a positive effect on personal, and corporate, productivity.

Research published by Infonetics earlier this year found that sales of UC hardware and software would top $1bn (£635m) worldwide by 2013, with Microsoft, Cisco and regional telcos leading the way, but smaller players also making inroads with innovative, low-cost UC platforms of their own.

“The focus of unified communication is transitioning to mobility, multimedia, and collaboration, with respondents looking to integrate cell phones, instant messaging, video and conferencing,” says Matthias Machowinski, Infonetics’ directing analyst for enterprise voice and data.

For its part, Cisco splits UC features into two distinct groups; those that are text based, such as email, instant messaging, blogs, wikis and document repositories, and those that involve real-time communications, such as IP telephony, videoconferencing and collaboration.

IP telephony
The voice part of the equation, or IP telephony, is often the most critical element, and one that the majority of end user organisations use as the basis for their initial UC rollouts.

IP telephony systems that convert audio calls into data packets that can be forwarded over standard IP local and wide area networks rather than analogue or digital telephone systems are common, though some organisations are still yet to make the transition.

Melissa Fremeijer is research analyst for European telecommunications and networking at IDC. She points out that many organisations can reduce their telephony costs by routing their IP voice traffic across the internet or WAN using the session initiation protocol (SIP) instead of the public switched telephone network.

“One of the main triggers for UC implementations is reduction of call costs through SIP trunking – it gives good return on investment,” she says.

SIP interoperability
Using a single vendor’s SIP platform within the firewall or across the WAN offers a degree of certainty that communications sessions will be successful, and SIP’s status as an open standard means organisations can be fairly certain that they can establish SIP sessions with business partners and customers using other brands of SIP hardware and software too.

UC vendors have taken on some responsibility for interoperability testing of each other’s equipment, and producing white papers listing compatible hardware and software.

“The idea that you can have a lock-in strategy around UC is false,” says Cisco European business transformation manager Paul Volkaerts. “We have to work with Cisco-only environments, but also Microsoft Office Communicator and Lotus SameTime, for example, and even on premises or cloud-based communication environments, depending on what the customer has. From what I have seen, SIP compatibility is good. I have not had a lot of feedback from end user organisations or systems integrators to suggest that this is posing a problem.”

But while all SIP-based UC platforms have to demonstrate a basic set of interoperable features and functions, manufacturers often offer additional feature sets that are not necessarily supported in other vendors’ solutions.

Pre-testing
This makes onsite pre-testing of UC platforms highly desirable, and many vendors will conduct on-premises trials and infrastructure assessments. Crucial to this is making sure that whatever UC platform is under evaluation can integrate with an existing analogue, digital or IP private branch exchange (PBX) telephone system, which may have been installed previously by a different vendor at considerable expense to the end user organisation.

“Most environments have a PBX somewhere and nobody throws that out and deploys UC in its place,” said Volkaerts.

“Very few companies will do a rip and replace, and ShoreTel integrates with IP PBXs from Nortel, NEC and Avaya – most of our sales are of a rollout nature,” says John Combs, chairman and CEO of UC vendor ShoreTel.

It is also important to make sure that an organisation’s underlying network infrastructure is able to handle the heavy data loads that IP-based voice and video communications can put upon it, both in terms of available bandwidth and the necessary resilience to support a mission-critical application such as voice.

This usually depends on the state of the LANs and WANs already in situ, but many vendors sell network upgrades alongside UC platforms or vice versa.

“Cisco, Avaya and the bigger players would probably want to build a UC platform into the network because that takes care of the whole infrastructure, but that is also costly,” says Fremeijer. “Lots of organisations are struggling [financially] with the recession, and that is where hosted UC solutions can come in.”

Unified messaging
These considerations are the same for UC platforms as they have been since IP telephony systems first began to appear 15 years ago. But what is different now is how much IP telephony software has been enhanced to let end users do so much more in terms of integrating IP telephony with other forms of communication, such as unified messaging (UM).

UM integrates different types of messaging, including email, SMS, instant messaging (IM) fax, voice and video messages, into a single information store that can be accessed via software run on a variety of client devices, whether IP telephones or “softphones” running on desktop, laptop, or handheld PCs, for example, and even mobile handsets.

“It’s about bringing all the communications tools you have as a user – the IP telephony piece, the managed messaging, the presence, video calling, collaboration and the ability to set up a meeting from any place in the world – onto the PC,” says Combs.

ShoreTel’s UC platform is also one of many that integrates with Microsoft Outlook’s calendaring and scheduling functions, allowing users to share information as well as communicate. The same functionality is also offered by Microsoft’s own UC software client, Office Communicator, which works as a front end on client devices for Microsoft Office Communications Server UC platform.

“One reason that customers go down the collaboration route is that their own employees are demanding it, because they can already perform the same functions with instant messaging and mobile phones and the internet at home, but find themselves less well connected when in the office,” says Cisco’s Volkaerts.