Unifying Unified Communications
Trading Traffic Vital
The closest comparison is the world of SMS, an industry that only took off when standards bridging different approaches were created. This allowed traffic from one vendor’s gear to be recognized by equipment from another. This level is the most difficult, and involves competitive as well as technical issues. A comparison can be made to the SMS market, which didn’t take off until providers recognized that creating alliances enabling them to trade traffic was vital. Ellwood Neuer, the Director of Sales Engineering for contact center technology firm Noble Systems, adds that the real test will be handling real-time applications such as voice and video.
The complexity of UC and the speed with which the world is evolving suggest that even sophisticated organizations – no matter how much brain power they have in their IT shops – may be best served by finding ways to avoid grappling with the complexities of linking disparate UC systems together.
The alternative, according to NetIQ’s UC and MSP Appliance Manager Erik Rudin, is to outsource the headaches. This can be any combination of managed, hosted or other types of services that can run systems on the customers’ premise or in the cloud.
“Put yourself in the shoes of a typical IT department and think of the pressure of what they are dealing with today and whether they want to deal with it or seek outside help,” Rudin said. “There is no right or wrong. Every company has to have own perspective.”
SIP Rules
Experts say that of all the evolving standards, SIP is the one that is emerging as the most likely to become the glue that knits the entire UC world together.
The protocol got its toehold as the putative standard for VoIP. It is expanding that beach head. Jeff Hicks, a Senior Software Architect for NetQoS, says that new video endpoints are SIP-compliant and that SIP is on the road to displacing H.323, which is used in much video conferencing today. Likewise, a SIP-based standard -- Session Initiation Protocol for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) -- is being used for instant message. “SIP is becoming the enabling standard for UC,” Hicks said.
Bob Romano, Radvision’s vice president of Enterprise Marketing, agrees. There are many tasks that each communications channel must accomplish, and having discrete silos of functionality to accomplish them leads to inefficiency, he said.
“You end up building completely separate solutions for SIP and H.323, and there is a lot of duplication such as firewall traversal and [managing] remote capabilities,” he said. “If we could get to a single protocol that encompasses voice, video and data, that would be a lot more efficient.”
The benefits of unified communications are becoming clear to the corporate community. The challenge is that the business case is a bit ahead of the technology. Tying together all the services, as well as adding presence and escalation capabilities, is a massively complex task. But not mapping out a strategy – whether it be to offload the task all or partially to a third party or to do it in house – puts the organization in the position of either struggling to keep the system running or simply living without some of UC’s advantages.
Carl Weinschenk
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