The combination of increased availability of a wide range of mobile devices incorporating SIP User Agents and a focus on SIP evolution to meet inter-networking requirements yields significant opportunities for developers of mobile enterprise applications. An enterprise is a community of resources directed towards positive business objectives. This article examines how SIP enables a member to actively participate in that community without sitting at a fixed location or being tied to a specific network so that transaction times can be reduced by action where the member is working.

Workflow Pauses Impair Business Efficiency

Programs to improve financial performance in the current business cycle emphasize revenue production per employee — a measure of efficiency — in managing the cost side of the equation for profitability. Failing to complete transactions within the duration window implied by transaction rate targets yields both lower revenue and higher costs per transaction — a double reduction of profitability.

Many factors effect the time it takes to complete individual transactions successfully. The focus of investigation here is the time it takes to communicate with community members who execute component tasks within a transaction. Traditionally, delays in reaching the next person in the string of tasks to complete a transaction were minimized by having a sufficient number of specialized staff on hand to handle the workload and having long completion windows for each transaction. Today’s business environment cannot afford narrowlyspecialized staffing and demands increasingly greater skills or knowledge to complete transactions. This has led to a workforce with blended skill-sets performing multiple roles. Both business demands for high transaction rates and customer demands for immediate gratification drive the enterprise community to short transaction duration. While the community as a whole has sufficient capacity to achieve transaction volume goals, an individual transaction may pause, due to unavailability of the appropriate skill or role resource.

The blocking factor of overlapping demands for specific skills and roles is compounded by the unreachability of seemingly available community members. Today’s telephone systems tie individuals to a fixed spot so any physical movement away from the phone set makes the individual unreachable, a condition only detectable by the lack of answered phone calls. Workarounds such as voicemail, email, call forwarding, Find-Me services, cell phones, instant messaging and WiFi (News - Alert) phones have evolved and seek to advance transaction processing as quickly as possible. However, they do not offer an integrated and coordinated approach to reducing transaction times.

SIP Enables Workflow Mobility

SIP is fundamentally about connecting communications sessions among users wherever they are available on the IP network using methods available to the user interface device. Deployment of SIP-based systems removes the constraints of physical location for establishing communications sessions and provides the basis for a coordinated approach to connecting individuals under varying reachability conditions.

The focus of SIP is the communications user and not the physical line. System software can track the user’s availability status as well as determine how the user is reachable at any given moment. Many SIP-based systems merely reimplement historical concepts of availability from legacy phone systems — registration of a SIP phone is equivalent to user availability to answer calls, and Find Me services are replicated as workarounds to reach individuals at different locations. Even at this rudimentary level, SIP-based systems can offer applications finergrained information on user availability as well as a broader reach to users on a wide range of generally available devices and software.

Advanced implementations of SIP-based systems can be capable of far greater precision of availability indication and reachability. Interfaced to applications via a variety of methods ranging from SIP stack interworking to Web services APIs, SIP infrastructure both consumes and exposes additional information regarding user activities that reflect on availability for defined tasks and roles. For instance, the SIP-based system can use availability information to modify call treatments based on calendar appointments. The automated exchange of information promotes more accurate determination of a user’s ability to respond so the system can return context-appropriate messages, advance to an alternate resource, or escalate the transaction as appropriate. Escalations may be hierarchical in a management chain, or may use alternate communications methods to reach the targeted resource. For example, an IM or SMS alert may also be sent through the SIP system with response options to accept the call, escalate, send reply message or divert to voicemail. These alternative actions are dependent only on the software capabilities or reachability of the users’ networked device.

Call Center ACDs (Automated Call Distributors) have long had the ability to change the availability of a line by changing the phone operating mode via a key press or application log-in to an agent role with assigned skills. The applicability of this operating scenario is generally limited to the Call Center application stack as well as proprietary phone instruments associated with the legacy environment. SIP provides a platform to extend communications to community members based on skills and roles across the entire network. Again, integration with applications offers flexible workflow integration not envisioned for currently deployed communication environments.

SIP-based systems are easily implemented as software services in data center operations similar to data applications. SIP also partners well in Web services-style integration with workflow applications, leading to easily implemented and modified applications that keep up with business changes. Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) leverage this level of integration to orchestrate multiple applications into comprehensive business processes. Interestingly, this flexible application interface enables creative ways of determining user availability and automates policy and preference decisions that maximize productivity of the enterprise community, regardless of user location.

Software SIP clients extend the conceptual model to include the user in managing their own availability and reachability preferences. While users may actually use existing PBX (News - Alert) phones during migration from a legacy telephony infrastructure, improved availability management promotes convergence to a minimum number of devices with greater productivity and availability capabilities.

Business Efficiency Everywhere

Mobility in this environment varies from “hallway warriors” within a single building to “nomads” traveling around the globe. While SIP supports dynamic movement from point-to-point, office-to-office, office-to-conference room, and site-to-site, wireless technologies fill-in connectivity while in motion between points. WiFi access to local networks maintains connectivity within buildings where wide-area radio coverage is inconsistent. Wide area wireless provides reachability when out of WiFi range. Untethering a PC via wireless carries all application resources along with it, but is rather inconvenient to use while in motion. SIP wireless phones are easier to use onthe- go within limited areas, but are not universal instruments, except in specific voice applications.

Converged mobile devices coming to market combine a wide area switched mobile phone (i.e., GSM or CDMA) with a PDA and WiFi that can support SIP communications concurrently. These devices offer equipment options to enterprises for a universal communications device that can be used for community activities wherever the member happens to be. The combined communications capabilities can replace separate desktop phones, cell phones, mobile email devices and PDAs with a single device for many community members. Leveraging enterprise SIP infrastructure, the device participates in the enterprise phone network and can manage the cellular phone calls as extensions to the SIP infrastructure providing the advantages of fixed-mobile convergence today. The SIP-based system deployed to enable this wideranging mobility for an enterprise community will support the migration of 3GPP and PSTN networks to IMS over the coming years.

The form factor of converged devices ranges from phone-like to full-blown PDA to fit individual application requirements. The fact that most of these devices support at least messaging, enterprise calendaring and email as well as web browsing means the devices can be used in many SOA-orchestrated business processes. The data network interface to both application portals and SIP infrastructure frees business analysts and application process designers to gain precious response time improvements from community members without tying them down to specific locations. The ability of a SIP system to determine availability of mobile users and to incorporate multiple methods to reach these users with essential communications improves the customer relationship, whether the transaction is a sale approval or a critical response to a medical condition. In these cases, simple transactions do not have to delay revenue recognition and critical responses are not dependent on key personnel being at a specific location.

SIP is a key technology for business communications platforms, offering unified communications and deployed to serve increasingly mobile enterprise communities in their efforts to reduce transaction delays that limit business productivity. Higher revenue, increased profit, and even better lifestyles can result from fully leveraging the capabilities of SIP with IT applications.

Hall Clark is a Senior Product Manager at BlueNote Networks. For more information, please visit the company online at www.bluenote.com.