Demystifying next-gen telecom buzzwords

Brand-new buzzwords are flittering around the telecom airwaves. Vendors are floating concepts that sound vaguely similar and different at the same time: Avaya Inc.'s communications-enabled business processing, Nortel Networks' business-optimized networking, and Cisco Systems Inc.'s application-aware network. What do they mean exactly?"They're all basically the same concept," says Carmi Levy, SVP of strategic communications at Toronto-based AR Communications. "It's little more than marketing-speak to differentiate their offerings." He says a generic definition of the underlying concept, freed of branding, would be: A holistic network that's aware of all the application-specific implications on its performance. There are some powerful implications in this emerging area. To successfully move to converged services on an IP network, the infrastructure needs to be buttressed with heavy-duty gear to ensure reliable quality of service (QoS). "Simply building bigger pipes isn't enough," he says. "An application-aware infrastructure recognizes that a particular network segment is for voice not data, so the QoS needs to be more stringent. You have to establish thresholds, monitor them and have an automated system of alarms to bring in human intervention. And you need better hardware, software and processes for that."But once that network infrastructure is in place, it opens new possibilities to weave communications into applications and processes to save businesses significant time and money. Implementations of unified communications (UC) platforms that can support this higher-level functionality have been lukewarm largely because vendors have been selling them to technical rather than business buyers, says Levy. "Companies don't buy technology because it's cool but because the value proposition is well-understood by those writing the checks. That's where the buzzwords come in." Business executives are starting to take notice of new communications offerings that can make their businesses run faster and harder.Blending communications and processesThe concept of communications-enabled business processing (CEBP) goes beyond simply describing an intelligent network that's robust enough to support converged services. "In CEBP, features and functionality pop up in your business applications as you're doing your routine job - things like click-to-call and conferencing on the fly," explains Henry Dewing, principal analyst at Boston-based Forrester Research Inc. Both analysts agree Avaya takes the concept of CEBP furthest. "Networks are able to react to business events and automatically initiate communications paths," says Dewing. This isn't theoretical, as some early adopters are already experimenting with it. Global appliance manufacturer Whirlpool Corp., an Avaya customer, is a poster child for CEBP. The company's network monitors data feeds that automatically trigger a communications response. For example, if stock prices move beyond a set threshold, the network automatically sends a notification to senior financial staff for decision-making. "It could be an SMS, voice mail or email - if you've co-ordinated your communications infrastructure, it'll actually walk through all those options until it gets a response."More complex communications can be scripted depending on the scenario, he says. For example, if a manufacturing line is down, different stakeholders need to be notified. One set of communications may go to the sales group to let them know the products won't be ready on time and the estimated delay, while another set may go to operations staff and the vendor of the manufacturing system to notify them of the problem and automatically organize a conference call on the fly so they can discuss how to fix it.Cisco also has a poster child, says Dewing: A Subway sandwich franchise in Arizona. In this case, an overwhelmed regional manager with 26 shops to oversee uses CEBP to stay on top of his teams of teenaged employees. "Subway has a management guide that says the first employee has to be in at X time, the bread in the oven at Y, tomatoes have to be chopped at Z, and so on," explains Dewing. But the manager couldn't be physically present at all his sites, and lunchtime sales began to fall as standards slipped. With an application that runs on Cisco's IP phone, employees now clock in on the phone when tasks are completed, and the manager is notified wherever he may be. Moreover, another headache was finding replacements when employees failed to show up for their shifts. With CEBP, messages are sent simultaneously to all off-duty employees and managers. "So by keeping track of the presence of employees and the status of business processes, the communications infrastructure is acting like the manager," says Dewing. The term CEBP is gaining traction. "Cisco calls it CEBP as well, so they've come full circle," he says, pointing out the concept resonates better with business buyers when the process capabilities are emphasized rather than the infrastructure requirements embodied in Cisco's older term, application-aware network. "In today's process world, the last mile is the communications path to employees, customers, suppliers and experts that can support better decision-making."Technology foundations While CEBP shows promise, many underlying technologies need to mature before it's ready for prime time. "It has the potential to really mess around with the way the network handles data streams, so UC is the actual telecom infrastructure technology needed to make CEBP work," says Dewing. But UC adoption is still relatively low. In a recent Forrester survey, about 20% of respondents said they were deploying or upgrading to UC infrastructure, says Dewing. But he believes even those low figures are somewhat inflated, as the definition of what constitutes UC is ambiguous. "Maybe they have IM, VoIP and presence in place but every time I talk to a company about UC, the first question is, how do you define that?"UC, in turn, rests on adoption of VoIP. "Although it's been around for 10 years, we're just now getting to the point where over half the shared lines sold to enterprises are VoIP." Most enterprises have no compelling business case for replacing their current communications systems yet, as the typical economic life of a PBX is about seven to 12 years. "There was a big push around Y2K to replace old PBXs, so we had a bit of a jump in the VoIP market then. But replacing TDM - that's not going to happen for another three to 10 years." Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is another fundamental technology needed to make CEBP possible. Communications functions are exposed and linked to applications via Web services, and these can in turn be automated to invoke other Web services or set up communications paths for human intervention. "How to handle the integration needed to expose the communication service inside the application, or vice versa, is not a well-exercised talent," says Dewing. "We're into a chicken-and-egg question. Is CEBP a SOA architecture solution? Which concept is lower or higher level?"In addition, presence capability and people's roles are also needed for CEBP. "You need robust business applications, be it a corporate meta-data in a central database or a well-maintained local application, that tells you who the decision-makers or other experts are, what hierarchy tree to follow and so on."A brain that monitors for triggers and manages the communications response is built on top of this foundation. In Subway's instance, an intelligent Cisco IP phone runs the relatively discrete set of instructions, says Dewing. "For retail, these intelligent phones can do store paging, price checks, bar code reading and other functions." In Whirlpool's instance, Avaya's process manager middleware is the brain that handles its more complex CEBP functions.Trends in the CEBP spaceFew enterprises have all the components today to be properly considered CEBP-ready. "This can be a $50,000 or a $1 million project, depending on the scale of the business processes," says Dewing. Nevertheless, he believes there will be some uptake in the near future. "I would say within three years, we'll see some mainstream CEBP applications available that can be easily integrated with replicable results."Avaya is making big investments and actively hiring in this area, says Amir Hameed, director of applications sales at Markham-based Avaya Canada. "We see this as the next paradigm shift. Enterprises are moving from traditional to IP telephony, and now the big shift is from IP telephony to CEBP," he says. "The goal is to reduce human latency in business processes, as it costs money. At Whirlpool, decision-making was reduced from two hours to a few minutes."While CEBP can be a catalyst for enterprises to move towards convergence, he says the two aren't necessarily interdependent. "IP telephony is happening irrespective of CEBP. In 2005, we had our tipping point when we shipped more IP ports than traditional telephony."But he says CEBP can provide the business justification for investment in IP telephony, citing a 2006 Gartner Inc. study in which 80% of respondents said deploying CEPB resulted in significant competitive advantage and revenue differentiation. "This really perks customer interest, as it's in line with the strategic direction of their IT groups," says Hameed, adding there is big uptake in the manufacturing, financial and health services sectors, and Avaya is in discussions with some Canadian companies.While CEBP is still a large enterprise undertaking, companies with complex supply chains in particular can benefit from it - and major players are in a position to impose similar requirements on their suppliers in the future, says Levy. Wal-Mart, for example, was a pioneer in moving to open XML standards for supply chain management and requiring suppliers do the same. This can provide the stimulus for more uptake of CEBP in the future. "The more these types of companies can do to automate processes and the less people have to do manually, the easier it'll be to pull out costs," he says. "Large buyers will dictate terms for members of their supply chain connectivity, and if those aren't met, smaller vendors run the risk of getting cut off."

Demystifying next-gen telecom buzzwords

News | August 13, 2007

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