All mod comms

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.

Presence and mobility extension
Presence technology plays a key role in all these UC clients by providing users with information on the whereabouts of the person they are trying to contact. By knowing whether that person is better contacted via voice, IM or email, for example, the UC software client can improve a worker’s productivity by forwarding a message to the appropriate message repository automatically, without the user themselves having to waste time trying different modes of co mmunication.

Where mobility extension features are available within the UC platform, a presence indicator within the software client can also make a decision over which type of network a call or other type of communications session can be routed, often at minimum cost. If somebody calls a mobile number while the user is in the office, for instance, the software can automatically detect the person at the other end of the line is at their desk and route the call to a desktop phone, at a much cheaper mobile-to-landline rate.

Nortel is one of many vendors to provide mobile extension capabilities within its UC platform, providing features such as one number/voicemail/ caller ID, access to a corporate directory through the mobile phone, mobile conferencing, common call management and internal PBX extension dialling from mobile phones and also softphones running in laptop PCs. It can also deliver “campus” extensions to dual-mode Wi-Fi-enabled mobile phones that make and receive calls over wireless LANs.

Videoconferencing
Arguably the most significant recent advance in UC technology has been in the area of video communications. The SIP and H.264 video compression standards have supported the emergence of high-resolution, low-cost cameras able to support UC clients, while improvements in the resilience and performance of WAN and internet connections guarantee a certain level of performance.

Videoconferencing embedded with UC platforms takes the form of one-to-one or one-to-many conferencing applications, both desktop and web based, with corporate-class telepresence systems also being integrated by Cisco and others. Many organisations also use a form of podcasting for distance learning purposes, where informational videos are streamed to end user desktops within the UC client.

IDC believes the next wave of UC integration will accelerate the use of Web 2.0 technologies to build APIs into social networking and blogging sites, and using web mashups to present users with information feeds made up of data from many different sources within the UC software client. “When somebody calls you, you can see via that API a link to all the information about that person which is popped up in front of you, for example,” says Fremeijer.

Though this type of UC technology is still in its infancy, some UC clients are beginning to integrate blogs, wikis and discussion forums into electronic “team rooms” alongside communication and collaboration functions such as IM, allowing colleagues or business partners to talk while simultaneously sharing text-based information.

Licensed versus free
There are UC platforms on the market suitable for organiations and budgets of all sizes.

Infonetics reports that many organisations are going beyond traditional communication suppliers such as Cisco, Nortel, Avaya and Microsoft and considering low-cost offerings from the likes of Skype and Google, for example, which also offer limited-function communications applications such as videoconferencing, email and instant messaging for nothing.

However, the difference with this type of application is that they rarely integrate with legacy PBX systems or employee contact lists such as Active Directory. Nor do they offer intelligent call routing or mobility extension, or combine so many different forms of communication and collaboration tools within a single application interface.

“With UC platforms such as ShoreTel, ring one number and it will find the person. If you use Skype or Google, that is not going to happen, and there are all the things about security and so on too,” says Combs.

And where cost is an issue, it is possible to pay less for a basic UC platform offering a limited number of standard communications and collaboration features, then a separate licence fee for additional tools as user requirements expand.