Unifying the future

In a world filled with a vast and disparate array of technology, one of the main challenges of the day for communication providers is to make it easier for users to integrate and get the most out of the technology they currently use.

Unified Communications (UC) solutions are an attempt to allow users to access their work and each other across multiple devices and platforms at anytime, anywhere.

UC technology vendors are aiming to make it easier to communicate across a number of complex technologies.

As organisations around the world look for ways to improve business process efficiencies and address carbon footprint consumption, UC has emerged as
a frontrunner in the quest to bridge a mire of disparate communication systems.

David Cannon, program manager telecommunications at IDC, said CIOs are under increasing pressure to ensure that communication applications and equipment are aligned with business processes.

For Cannon, UC holds the promise of meeting many communications needs in a comprehensive manner.

“Business communication is on the cusp of a new era,” he said.

“UC will play a central role in helping information workers deliver with speed and accuracy.”

“Unified Communication transforms commonplace business applications into smart intuitive collaborative environments for instant decision-making and fast turnaround.”

The term Unified Communications was first bandied about by Microsoft several years ago to describe its suite of out-of-the-box messaging systems. However, users still needed a PBX infrastructure separate from the LAN.

According to Cannon the product did not really take off, with the term undergoing a revival by call centre product lines of IP PBX connecting telephone with LAN.

“That did away with two cabling infrastructures and you no longer needed twisted pair cabling for TV or a socket for a phone,” Cannon said.

“Cisco came out with IP PBX calls received through the LAN infrastructure and provided a server that could connect into an exchange server and voicemail converted to send via email,” he said.

“Today with Cisco and its IP PBX the technology comes with a suite of applications that allow for all sorts of unified messaging that uses the same server to receive faxes and send to email.”

Since then other vendors have found that unification and simplification achieves faster return on investment than building proprietary systems from the ground up.

The next cab off the UC rank was the ‘click-to-call’ technology from Microsoft. Through Microsoft Outlook, or through a desktop application, users could find contacts, click on their number and then bridge a call from their phone directly to the other person, all done from a desktop.

The technology can facilitate a host of telephony and allow PBX technology to drive it from the desktop.

Harold Melnick, Unified Communications senior product manager at Microsoft, said the software giant views UC as the automation and integration
of business communications.

“Put simply, Unified Communications technologies enable you to merge telephone-based tasks such as phone calls, voicemail and conferencing, with computer-based tasks such as documentation, spreadsheets, instant messaging, email and calendars,” Melnick said.

“By integrating disparate communications processes and systems, Unified Communications technologies help you achieve consolidated and unified messaging, an improved data presence, and greatly enhance voice and conferencing capabilities. You also benefit from a streamlined, simple platform that is easy to scale over time.”

According to Melnick, Microsoft offers four key software components in its UC solution.

These include Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, Microsoft Office Live Meeting and Microsoft Windows Server Active Director 2003.

He said these technologies can help businesses integrate their telephone use with their computer-based activities.

“It’s simple, streamlined and highly scalable,”
Melnick said.

He said the UC market is changing in response to a rising demand for business productivity and effectiveness and an increasing number of workers not being based in offices.

“By deploying Exchange Server, which offers a foundation for UC and VoIP, while also deploying Microsoft Office Communication Server, we can establish presence and VoIP.
The benefits are that it is easily scaleable and you can add users as needed.

“Unlike systems of the past where telephony was provided by a single vendor providing devices and hardware, we take a different approach of offering customers a broad ecosystem on either hardware and software and we are able to give the customer greater flexibility in how they roll out their technology and the cost of hardware and software in their own stride,” Melnick said.

He said that with Microsoft’s UC solution all voicemail can be played over the desktop and users can click to call without having to open their contacts list and search for information.

“All you need is already there. You have lots more flexibility and don’t have to start a new application,” Melnick said.

Microsoft is not alone in the UC space. NEC is another company directly competing with Microsoft for a share of the lucrative UC market.

Steve Woff, business manager applications at NEC, said the company is uniquely placed to deliver UC to companies of any size with its Univerge product.

“NEC’s product offering enables us to provide Unified Communications to smaller companies – as few as 10 people, right up to larger enterprises,” Woff said.

“NEC has a number of components of Unified Communications such as our telephony offering.

We measure everything around UC because you have to be around that and customers need confidence that it is a rock solid offering that will always be available,” said Woff.

NEC takes the view that the Internet is the key component of getting messaging information quickly and effectively.
UC also covers video conferencing and the ability to share applications to work together in real time.

“UC is being able to send email and having a presence while having all the information about people and where they are on a centralised system,” he said.

“Potentially, the most important facility is mobility and having access to a desktop wherever I am and being able to access devices such as PDAs and laptops.

“It is about accessing information when and where it is wanted and then, when you have all that technology it is about getting an interface into other applications and being able to tie the two together, tailored to the user’s role and what they are doing.”

Woff said that in terms of UC, not everyone wants the same thing, with the exception of course of a maximum return on investment that can be delivered right throughout the organisation.

“UC is all about infrastructure and mobility and not just using one vendor as most companies have a lot of different infrastructure.
It comes down to making technology work despite the variations in infrastructure,” he said.

“Customers don’t really want to know what application they are getting, instead they want seamless applications and high-speed 3G and DSL.”

James Sia, director of Unified Communications business development at Avaya Asia Pacific, said while the term Unified Communications means different things to different vendors, it can be split between voice, mobile phones and a “whole conversation around convergence”.

“Unified Communications is a set of very different solutions and applications converging to offer an easier solution and about adding voice to the communications platform,” he said.

“We are providing a whole array of devices such as a mobile phone and we have applications that transfer any enterprise communication easily and directly into a mobile phone.

“For instance missed calls with our OneX product can tell me what calls I have missed and see who has left a voice message and if they are travelling or whether to make the call back to Sydney. You simply call an extension and this is making communications seamless, unified and convergent.”

Sia said that Avaya’s approach to UC is to make communications seamless and convergent.

“We talk about this as a bridge where we can use premium conferencing allowing voice calls between people and for them to collaborate,” he said.

“We provide not only the customer solution needed to integrate into a Unified Communications system but we also facilitate the users and make their lives as simple as possible by, for instance, integrating video onto desktop and mobile.”

According to Sia, Avaya’s Softphone product through its Onex portal thin-client allows a user to go to any computer where a web phone is launched and listen to emails.

“If the user is taking a short trip they may not want to take the laptop, but can check into the airport lounge where they have a soft phone broadband provider.

If I am working at home and want to make a call to the office it can be done through the portal,” he said.

These examples of tightening integration of communication technologies will become increasingly common according to NEC’s Woff.

“Unified Communication is changing to be based on what consumers do with smarter devices, having documents with availability in real time across the communications and merging products together,” Woff said.

“A couple of years ago we had very disparate systems and now we are seeing a lot more integration and accessibility everywhere.
We are also seeing more presence wherever people are and whatever they
are doing.

“There has been a push in Unified Communication around VOIP, but we support more than that.
It is more about ‘what I want to achieve at home with a standard analogue phone’ and the need to get as much as possible from the laptop where you can really connect at a café at higher bandwidth.

Employees are expecting to work and people really want to work from home.”

More recently the focus for UC has been on the call centre environment and the push from those centres to be more efficient, according to IDC’s Cannon.

“Those functions have been rolled out for mass business to apply and there is no reason why the rest of business should not use them,” Cannon said.

“In the past 12 months functionality has evolved and applications are increasingly adding more functionality.”

“Databases are expanding and interfaces such as core business applications such as CRM, ERP and applications from SAP and Oracle are integrating applications into that UC infrastructure.”

Cannon said UC was evolving into a business process enhancement service offering, initially deployed by IP PBX to consolidate contact lists and push phone calls over the data network and then bringing about data conversion with internal calls between offices.

“UC allows you to get rid of legacy voice infrastructure and to consolidate over the network. It’s about converging data and voice networks and deploying other various applications such as voicemail, messaging and click to call,” he said.

“Then as the business moves towards integrating core business applications you get enhanced processes by leveraging the communications infrastructure.

“The new industry focus on Unified Communications resonates with the need for a flexible and cost-effective solution that leverages new technologies
and communication devices,” said Cannon.

Microsoft’s Melnick predicts UC technology will continue to further integrate Office Server and bring further integration of user capabilities.

He said the UC market is also moving more towards software-based solutions that are more cost-effective to deploy.

“Whether a partner or customer, these capabilities are becoming available to everyone. People are seeing that UC saves time and allows people to talk and use instant messages in a group environment, bringing them together,” Melnick said.

Kate Castellari