All for one and one for all: Unified communications requires team players

Unified communications (UC) promises multimedia connectivity on multiple devices, and at any time. To that extent, the technology is worthy of its name. But because making that happen requires bringing together office phone systems, mobile devices, e-mail, wireless networks and assorted other bits and pieces, unified communications often makes a typical business's communications architecture more complex. At one time there was a monolithic phone system and a similarly monolithic e-mail system, two Towers of Babel that didn't speak to each other. But now these towers have come down, and the simultaneous translation can be quite a job. In the past, says Ron Gruia, Toronto-based enterprise communications program leader at research firm Frost and Sullivan, most enterprise communications sales were tightly coupled to the organization's choice of PBX vendor. If you had a Nortel Networks PBX, you bought Meridian voice mail. If you were a Lucent shop (now Alcatel-Lucent - a unit of Paris-based Compagnie Financiere Alcatel), you bought Octel, or later Avaya. "There was still room for a little diversification," Gruia says. Many vendors provided the ability to work with others' products, but often the functionality wasn't as complete as it would be with a single vendor. A cacophony of vendors Now things are getting more complicated. One reason is that the emerging unified communications market has attracted players from outside the traditional phone system business. The most obvious example is Microsoft Corp., which last fall launched a direct assault on this market with Office Communications Server 2007, software that runs on a Windows server and that Microsoft claims is a complete unified communications offering. "If you listen to Microsoft, they'll say soon they can be the only (vendor)," says Roberta Fox, president and senior partner of Fox Group Consulting in Mount Albert, ON. But today's reality is not that simple. While Gruia says that "certainly going to be a force to contend with" as it leverages its strength on the desktop, the software vendor must still couple itself tightly with traditional voice communications vendors. An example is the Innovative Communications Alliance (ICA) that Microsoft and Nortel announced in early 2007. Setting up joint demonstration centres, pitching their wares together to customers, and cooperatively developing products that combine Microsoft applications and Nortel voice technology, the two firms reported in February that they have lined up 500 joint customers. Tony Rybczynski, director of enterprise global strategy marketing at Nortel, calls his company's relationship with Microsoft a "unique partnership." The companies have cross-licensed technology, Nortel was involved in the OSC launch, and there are even Nortel employees working at Microsoft's Redmond, WA, campus headquarters. "We think we're somewhat unique among vendors in that we're getting right into the lion's den." Yet Rybczynski also acknowledges that most vendors are working on interoperability with Microsoft. And a good many are also working with IBM, which, like Microsoft - though to a lesser extent so far, Gruia says - is pushing into unified communications. "What we're discovering is a real need to interoperate," agrees Amir Hameed, director of applications sales for Avaya. The reality for most customers is that if you want advanced functionality, you will probably need to work with more than one vendor. In particular, most companies still have separate voice mail and e-mail platforms, as well as commitments on the desktop. "There is no single vendor that can cover every element of what people call unified communications," says Paul McDevitt, director of enterprise marketing for Cisco Systems Canada Co. in Toronto. "You're obviously going to get more complex and you're going to have more systems integration requirements," adds Bryan Sheppeck, vice-president of application sales for North America at Alcatel-Lucent in Murray Hill, NJ. The MaRS Discovery District, a non-profit innovation centre in downtown Toronto, is one such example of a complex environment. MaRS set out to integrate not just voice and e-mail, but video communications as well, and to extend unified communications outside its physical facilities to virtual offices and home workers. To do that, says Robert Smith, MaRS' chief technology consultant, MaRS has among other things tied its Tandberg videoconferencing gear in with its Nortel unified communications system. That was possible thanks to Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), a standard widely seen as central to integrating voice over internet protocol and unified communications components. Working with SIP can be tricky, Smith notes, because different vendors' implementations are not always completely compatible. But he says he has found technology vendors generally co-operative in getting things to work together. SIP can be the key to integration SIP is "basically the preferred mode of session management within an IP world," says Paul Lopez, general manager of marketing and services for NEC Unified Solutions Inc. in Irving, TX. "Without SIP, you don't have a way to pass that call control across ." "I see SIP as absolutely critical and the rallying point" for interoperability, Hameed says. But he also warns that adherence to SIP doesn't always mean total compatibility. Some vendors use proprietary extensions to SIP, he says, and that can lead to interoperability problems with other products. Rybczynski from Nortel concurs that SIP is "critically important" as the communications glue. However, for integrating applications the other important piece will be service-oriented architectures to make it easy to tie disparate software together. It will be very important that all vendors present standard interfaces to work with others' products. "The last thing the application environment needs is any vendor dependency in terms of having to know what's in there." As unified communications evolves, Gruia says, hardware will become less important and software more so. Hardware will thus become more open, supporting software from different suppliers. The key differentiator for hardware suppliers will be reliability and availability. Working with a single core hardware supplier will be an option, and probably a good way to keep things as simple as possible, but in most cases the hardware platform will have to support software from multiple sources. So communications may be unified, but monolithic? Not so much. Playing with others a must Sometimes, Smith says, integration issues lead to "sliding elegance," meaning that features work better with some devices than with others. That's fine: the number one priority is to get the basic functionality working. The approach businesses take will depend partly on the vendor, argues Will Moore, vice-president and head of operations for Canada with Siemens Enterprise Communications, Inc. in Mississauga, ON. "It depends on how proprietary your core system is," he says. Proprietary technology at the core will then force customers to rely on additional proprietary applications around that core. A more proprietary approach can sometimes be more efficient, he says, but it also comes with restrictions. It also depends on the customer, notes NEC's Lopez. On the information technology side, many enterprise customers become their own integrators. But others want to focus on their core business. For them, a single-vendor approach has its attractions, because they don't have to worry so much about application integration problems. Many large customers already have multi-vendor environments and little hope of getting away from that situation. Others in the small- and medium-sized business space, on the other hand, are seeking single-vendor solutions for the sake of simplicity. But "what you want to have is flexibility," Lopez warns. "The natural hesitation to a single-vendor approach is: am I going to get locked in to something?" So while it may make sense to rely heavily on one supplier, it's also a good idea to make sure that what the vendor provides will interact with popular client and server components. As a result, unified communications vendors aim to capture sizeable shares of their customers' business, while also emphasizing their ability and willingness to integrate with other vendors' gear. "I don't see that there's ever going to be a single vendor," says Fox. She adds that the most customers can hope for is that one vendor can take the lead, providing the core of the unified communications system and making sure that its offerings work with needed third-party components. That role typically falls to the UC vendor in large enterprises, while smaller businesses are more likely to turn to a carrier. Smith at MaRS says he sees a clear role for a core vendor - in his case Nortel - to provide an open platform and a basis for integrating pieces from third parties. The key thing is for there to be a partnership that ensures the customer knows where to turn when there is a problem. Moore from Siemens agrees, "What you don't want to see is an accident in the parking lot...when the system goes down and you've got three or four vendor trucks rolling in, blaming each other."

All for one and one for all: Unified communications requires team players

News | 03/11/2008 7:46 pm EDT

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