Unified Communications - The New Business Differentiator

Telephony is no longer a stand-alone communications medium. The evolution of unified communications is changing the way we communicate in the business arena. But what is unified communications exactly, and how does it help businesses?

The phrase “unified communications” is generally used to describe what is happening in the converging voice and data markets as IP telephony consolidates communications and data on to a single network, and more and more applications are brought into the network for increased business efficiency and cost savings.

The role of open standards in unified communications

The evolution to unified communications is largely being enabled by the emergence of SIP (session initiation protocol) as the “lingua franca” of multimedia communications. SIP-based systems provide richer communications and enhanced collaboration through voice, video, instant messaging, presence and other services. The first suite of SIP applications supporting interoperability with other SIP devices and applications was introduced in 1996.

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To be widely usable and useful, unified communications must be open standards-based, taking advantage of the most common protocol standards: SIP, Linux and web services. Customers are tired of proprietary vendor lock-in, and organisations should look to partner with vendors who embrace standards as well as innovations, since these are the foundation on which companies can build business-enhancing solutions.

Despite being a standard, SIP implementations do vary. Some vendors offer SIP interoperability as an interface into their own non-SIP telephony systems. Another approach is using standard SIP among end-points such as IP phones, video cameras, call controllers and gateways to the public network.

When should you make the move to unified communications?

The market is inexorably moving towards voice and data convergence. Voicemail, unified messaging conferencing, presence and instant messaging are built into more and more voice over IP (VoIP) products. VoIP solutions are much cheaper than they used to be, and a great replacement for the traditional analogue system.

2007 is likely to be the first year that IP phones outsell traditional phones. Nearly all PBX vendors now offer IP telephony products, and there are well-established solutions available for all areas of the market, from the smallest SME to the largest enterprise. The life of traditional systems is typically around 10 years, but over time it’s certain that all organisations will convert to VoIP as legacy products cease to be manufactured and supported.

According to a recent report by the Dell’Oro Group, SIP and unified communications will play a major role in pushing the PBX market to more than $7.5billion by 2011 as voice over IP (VoIP) gains in popularity in organisations of all sizes.

Unified communications for large enterprises and SMBs

We believe it’s important to enable enterprises of all sizes to easily integrate data and voice. Although large enterprises are furthest along in migrating to IP telephony, we are seeing government agencies and universities also adopting it. SMBs are slower to migrate because of perceived cost and complexity but, in reality, voice-ready networks offer simple migration to IP telephony in a secure, high quality, open-standards-based package. A VoIP solution meets three key SMB requirements: ease of use, reliability and low cost, as well as increased business efficiency.

Where are we today?

VoIP has already changed the way employees communicate with each other, with customers, and with suppliers. What began as a simple way to eliminate toll charges by packetising the bitstreams of voice communications and routing them as IP packets has advanced dramatically over the past decade, improving quality, reducing cost, and implementing new services and applications that go far beyond the capabilities of the most modern legacy PBX systems. The technology has been proven already, and will develop even more forcefully into an exceptionally effective and affordable way for people to communicate. Voice has become a software application that works in conjunction with other business applications.

Currently, disparate systems and presence requirements for voice mail, e-mail, and faxes result in accessibility for voice-mail only from the telephone, e-mail only from the PC, and faxes only in person. VoIP networks with IP messaging software change all that. Users can see their voice mail and faxes as e-mail messages, and can even opt to have their e-mail read aloud to them. This integration enables faster responses and dramatically increases user productivity. Users can access extensive distribution list capabilities, including the ability to schedule delivery of messages.

For network security, VoIP networks automatically recognise when a phone is attached to the network, place that phone into the VLAN with high priority, assign high priority to the voice data stream during a voice call to ensure sound quality, and protect the voice traffic from vulnerabilities.

What opportunities do unified communications offer the channel?

The trusted, competent network and telephony reseller is still the preferred place to go for advice on VoIP and unified communications, as they can offer the full solution, providing voice services as well as integrating and managing hardware and applications. Organisations want to concentrate on their business, and not have to invest in these skills themselves, so the channel needs to build its ability to offer advice to organisations on their network and their transition to VoIP.
In the next three to five years, the industry will be dominated by full-solution VARs that provide end-to-end solutions.

The benefits of unified VoIP communications

The real value of VoIP lies in a cohesive communications strategy, where all your applications and devices are integrated. Unified communications through VoIP means that Microsoft Outlook, your office phone system, mobile devices such as Blackberries, customer support, and CRM tools can all connect and talk together, sharing and maximising a common datastore of client information. What better way to serve your clients?

So - has unified communications gone from a ‘nice idea’ to a ‘must-have’ technology? Global analyst house IDC believes the business case for unified communications centres is based on improving employee productivity and collaboration options while driving down the cost by avoiding the maintenance of multiple communication applications and infrastructure. Therefore, I would say – yes, VoIP is a must-have technology for all organisations.

Mohit Rampal is country manager for India and SAARC, 3Com