Unified Communications and Presence Reach Out

By: Richard “Zippy” Grigonis

Unified Communications (News - Alert) (UC) and Presence continues to transform both large and small businesses by speeding up business processes and bringing together disparate forms of messaging and collaboration, even if an organization’s employees happen to be mobile. UC can even call upon social networks to bolster its presence capabilities. In a sense, you’re whole company is now becoming an extended contact center, propelled by UC technology.

At Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert), Peter Anderholm, Product Manager of Conferencing and Collaboration Products, says “We’re promoting how UC is becoming dominant in our everyday life as well as changing everyday life and making it better. For example, one of our customers in North America is truly using presence, conferencing and collaboration to change the way students are taught. I’ve been with Alcatel since 2004 when it acquired eDial, a company that brought the presence server into the Alcatel enterprise product family. Back then presence had a big push. There was much talk of rich presence. But then things died down a bit. Now, however, I see a new resurgence in interest — people are starting to understand what presence can do and how it can benefit their business or specific workflow or vertical application.”

“We’ve done quite a bit regarding presence and UC,” says Anderholm. “We have our own native ‘UC’ application that shows presence from our telephone systems and IM systems. We can check your presence to see if you’re on a conference call or a web collaboration session, and so forth. We can with our standard APIs do various forms of presence integration involving our UC client and the APIs of Facebook (News - Alert), Twitter or Yammer. We’ve also done near-field RFID presence, so you can now have a employee or student badge to ‘feed’ our UC client to show the geo-location or campus location of your contacts in the UC client or even a standard business app, which is great for verticals. We call this service Touchatag, formerly called tikitag. Touchatag makes it possible to create apps enabling the launch of online applications with a simple touch of an RFID enabled device, such as a mobile phone. So, we continue to explore ways of exploiting both our internal products and external ‘Web 2.0’ technologies. And speaking of Twitter and Yammer, using our SIP server we can feed presence or accept presence. It’s also communications-enabling, so it’s not just presence but it also involves click-to-call, click-to-see, click-to-conference. These, by the way, employ REST [REpresentational State Transfer] based APIs, which have been part of this platform since it was formulated years ago, long before REST become fashionable. SOAP [Simple Object Access Protocol] based Web Services are going out of fashion because they come with a lot of bloat and complexity.”

“For example, if I’m on the phone in our UC application,” says Anderholm, “that ‘on the phone’ status will show up in Twitter, from my account. And anybody who follows me on Twitter and who enables SMS notification for my social status or presence, will receive an SMS that reads, ‘Peter is on the phone’ or ‘Peter is online’. We can do the same with Facebook and Twitter too. We also have a custom note field in our UC app so instead of typing into Twitter that I’m at the Boston airport, the UC app can automatically feed that information directly into Twitter. I’m told that Twitter doesn’t yet allow presence info to be bidirectional, so we can feed Twitter presence info, but you cannot yet use Twitter to feed our application with presence info. However, I hear that Twitter will start supporting that sometime in the first half of 2009.”

UC IT Through

CallTower (News - Alert), founded in 2002, has mastered the art of providing UC solutions as a hosted service, with high reliability, a single point of support, productivity-enhancing items and 24/7 service, all for a fixed monthly fee. CallTower’s services are based on the UC hit parade of Cisco (News - Alert) Unified Communications Manager (CallManager) as the softswitch, Cisco IP Contact Center and Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) through the proprietary CallTower vXML VoiceCube voice messaging platform.

Recently, CallTower launched what’s claimed to be the industry’s first true hosted solution combining Microsoft (News - Alert) OCS 2007 and Cisco CallManager along with a single interface and bill for telephony services, web and audio conferencing, unified messaging, voice-to-text, text-to-voice, Internet, presence, screen pops and more. CallTower’s on-demand CallManager solution with a fully integrated OCS platform delivers an ROI without capex, expensive infrastructure and network upgrades.

Bob Barnes, Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for CallTower, says, “We leverage the Microsoft OCS platform to deliver and leverage presence for web conferencing, quick-to-dial, screen pops, videoconferencing, and even conference room-to-conference room teleconferencing. We have our own audio conferencing solution and we integrate the MS Exchange with related things such as the BlackBerry (News - Alert), and deliver it to an average business customer base — which these days averages about 80 employees, I believe, in three locations. So it’s slightly larger than the typical VoIP play or even the hosted Exchange play that’s out there. The reason we’re in the space and succeeding is because we’re really the only provider offering the full breadth of UC solution with the kind of name brand recognition that Cisco and Microsoft bring to the marketspace.”

The Do-Anything Machine for UC

Getting the disparate forms of communications comprising UC to work and pass back and forth from the organization these days generally requires a single, versatile, gateway/switching device. Fortunately, NET (News - Alert) Quintum, formerly Quintum Technologies, has developed their famous intelligent Tenor VoIP access switching and gateway solutions that are deployed in enterprise and service provider networks worldwide. The Quintum Tenor solution offers Survivability to maintain live telephony communications in branch office locations, even if the IP PBX (News - Alert) network fails. Tenors are designed to fit into virtually any network offering and compatibility across PBX and IP PBX environments and they have low TCO because Tenors require no PBX modifications, no additional equipment, and no provisioning expenses.

Moreover, the Unified Communications Proxy (UCP) enables the Tenor to provide “Any-to-ny” connectivity between the UC cloud, the PSTN, TDM equipment and SIP VoIP equipment. Thus, the Tenor can switch SIP-to-SIP calls, TDM-to-TDM calls and SIP-to-TDM calls, facilitating integration into any existing voice network. This flexibility allows service providers to deploy VoIP to customer premises, regardless of whether the existing network supports SIP, TDM switching, or both.

A key feature the UCP brings to Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 is that it can support multiple gateways off of one Microsoft mediation server, thus allowing enterprises to support branch offices with legacy PBXs, IP-PBXs, analog and modem-based endpoints, as well as UC clients, without needing to deploy a Mediation Server at every branch location. This constitutes a tremendous savings for enterprises. The UCP even supports fax capabilities in a Microsoft OCS environment, offering a “fax around” for Microsoft Office Communications Manager 2007 by interpreting and routing calls directed between the fax machines and the PSTN.

The UC Enabler

Covergence (News - Alert) provides software solutions enabling organizations to transition from legacy voice to voice as a Web Service on their IP network. The Covergence Collaboration Gateway (News - Alert) (CCG) delivers controlled, secure connectivity between Microsoft OCS 2007 or Microsoft LCS 2005 and IBM Lotus Sametime 6.5 or greater, allowing users from different organizations or even different companies to work together as if served by the same UC platform, with shared presence information, IM and other features. Additionally, Covergence now offers the Covergence Session Manager (CSM), which consolidates voice and data onto a single IP network and virtualizes multi-vendor PBXs into a cohesive and centrally managed service — without having to replace the existing voice infrastructure. The CSM sits in the network core and moves real-time policy enforcement; routing, control, monitoring and interoperability out of the individual PBXs and into a common SOA-based session layer. CSM’s SOA interfaces eliminate direct point-to-point communications between the clients and servers, making it easier for organizations to reduce costs further through vendor consolidation and PBX centralization.

Covergence’s Rod Hodgman (News - Alert), Vice President of Marketing, says, “We’re not a UC provider, but a UC enabler. We focus on companies in the Global 1000 — large, multinational companies which have an enormous hundreds or thousands of PBXs from multiple vendors and many of them are running proprietary protocols. Many of them TDM, in fact. So our focus is to work with those customers to transform that environment and make voice, dialtone and presence become services and Web 2.0 interfaces on their network. Once they have that in place, they can do anything. It’s a very powerful construct. They can quickly embed this legacy VoIP capability into their UC systems. If you look at both Microsoft and IBM (News - Alert) and the way they go about integrating telephony, it’s through the SIP protocol. That’s a good thing to do, but it’s insufficient. It doesn’t help customers get H.323 systems or JTAPI interfaces on board, so our goal is to make things simple and easy for customers to take their existing legacy environment and plug that into the UC environment. It’s a popular idea, because at the bottom level, it takes all of the individual components such as the PBXs, and combines them into an integrated resource pool so that it appears and can be managed as a single logical resource. Once you do that you begin enabling these customers to save money because they’re able to increase their efficiency and utilization of the existing PBXs. They’re also able to begin to re-engineer those PBXs and they can add, modify and delete the platforms or capabilities within those platforms without disruption to the users above.”

“On the Northbound interfaces that conceptualizes lower level details, we provide a set of SIP interfaces allowing us to integrate any SIP device, handset or cellphone,” says Hodgman. “We also provide Web 2.0 interfaces that allow us to put voice into a browser. So now we’re talking about a zero-install client. If you’re able to allow a customer to deploy basic telephony service in a browser than rather than using a softphone or a hard phone, the Gartner (News - Alert) Group and others have predicted that such a model will save anywhere from $50 to $200 per user annually on IT costs. It opens up the whole infrastructure, plugging it into a modern architecture, and makes it simple and easy to embed the existing voice telephony UC or create communications-enabled applications. We’ve even been able to insert voice capability into iGoogle widgets. For example, we have a click-to-talk widget that can be plugged into a browser and a Flash phone for a browser, so you can dial directly from your browser and communicate to anyone using the codecs embedded in Flash. So we can enable customers to use basic communications services at an extremely low price point. In an organization of 100,000 people, somewhere between 20 and 50 percent of them use the phone by just picking it up and dialing someone, conversing, then hanging up. Those people would experience a great solution by using our browser-based telephony solution.”

UC See, UC Do

RADVISION furnishes products and technologies for unified visual communications over IP, 3G and emerging IMS/next-gen networks, enabling such things as high definition video-conferencing, converged video telephony services, and scalable desktop-based visual communications.

Bob Romano (News - Alert), Vice President of the Networking Business Unit focused on the enterprise market, says, “If you look at the integration of voice, data and video into a common application,” says Romano, “there’s no question that all major vendors are promoting their flavor of UC. Whether you’re coming from the application vendor side, or the network vendors, or the telephony vendors, they all recognize that they need a solution, because that’s the way the world is going. From a video perspective, if you examine the media streams, it’s really in that order of priority: integration into the voice environment, data and then video. Generally video in UC means ‘desktop video’ and although we see that there’s a lot of interest and promotion of that, particularly by vendors such as Microsoft, the actual deployments of it are not yet ubiquitous, nor even widespread. There are pilots and trials, but the hard ROI for desktop video in UC is still hard to define. We find instead that customers are looking at it since Microsoft is promoting it. It’s more like a ‘selling apple’ than an ‘eating apple’ right now. It has forced IBM to respond to it, and we have some plug-ins that work in the IBM environment that provide high-quality video that plugs directly into the Sametime messaging application, and we also work with Microsoft. From a video perspective, however, we’re not seeing major deployment. Still, we do have a desktop application that’s more focused at the videoconferencing world that ties together room-based videoconferencing, voice and video, but also data. It’s a browser-based plug-in, with automatic firewall traversal. It’s freely distributable client software. We’ve been quite successful with that.”

“Customers interested in video in the desktop and in their UC applications are ones who are already using video in room systems and they understand the benefits of it,” says Romano, “which I think caught Microsoft a bit by surprise with their OCS platform because when it first appeared it was, for all intents and purposes, proprietary. They were forced to come back to their vendors, Tandberg, Polycom (News - Alert) and RADVISION, and ask them to build some interoperability bridges to standards-based devices. It should be very interesting to see who wins out in the presence world. Microsoft is making great inroads on that and gaining marketshare. IBM is not to be counted out, however, and they’re investing about a billion dollars into their UC platform. And they have an almost fanatically loyal following. Cisco’s probably credited with having many UC strategies in terms of which client they’re going to end up standardizing on and how that’s all going to sort out. After all, they have a telephony solution, WebEx, their CUPC [Cisco Unified Personal Communicator] unified communications client and then, at the high end, telepresence.”

Amir Zmora, Vice President of Marketing for RADVISION’s Technology Business Unit (TBU) says, “We hear three things from vendors who actually develop solutions for unified communications. First is video and high quality video. Second is something that’s basically becoming mandatory, is presence and instant messaging. We see more advanced thinking in this respect in SIP such as MSRP [Message Session Relay Protocol] a protocol for transmitting a series of related instant messages in the context of a session. Third, and really surprising to me, is that people in their enterprises already have legacy H.323 solutions. that they don’t want to throw away, so they’re looking for ways to connect SIP and H.323 and even to add to their legacy H.323 solutions the kind of advanced functionality you find today in SIP, such as presence. We are providing customers will all sorts of solutions to integrate these two protocols together and also add the more advanced functionalities to the ‘old stuff’.”

Keeping One UC App on the Premises

Zeacom (News - Alert) devleops UC and contact center solutions for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) with up to 250 call center agents or 2,500 employees. Through its offices in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and the U.K., Zeacom serves some 2,500 customers across 25 countries. In 2008 their Zeacom Communications Center (ZCC) 5.1 software became compliant with key IP telephony solutions from Avaya (News - Alert). More recently, Zeacom teamed with the U.K. company 5i, the convergence specialist, to launch an ROI Calculator for the Zeacom Operator Console that 5i channel partners can use to demonstrate to business decision makers in IT procurement the cost efficiencies of their UC technology. The ROI Calculator compares the time it takes to perform typical communications tasks using traditional methods with the average savings when undertaking the same tasks with Zeacom’s Operator Console.

Ernie Wallerstein (News - Alert), Zeacom’s President of the Americas, says, “Unified communications is being pushed into the marketplace by two factors. One is the large enterprise providers such as Cisco, Avaya and now Microsoft, which is an interesting case because it’s analogous to Cisco pushing IP telephony in 1999. It’s the right concept and direction, but they’re not quite there yet. It took Cisco three to five years to stabilize their IP offering. Similarly, Microsoft is bringing a lot of attention to UC but they’re not quite able to deliver on it yet. The telephony aspects of UC isn’t their strength, nor is it the strength of their traditional reseller and distribution channels. In any case, the first major factor pushing UC to the enterprise are these large companies. Then there are companies who are pushing UC to the small and mid-sized business [SMB] market. The marketplace understands that UC is a software applications-based solution. The companies today that the average SMB approaches for UC is an interconnect – they’re going to their traditional telephony provider. That’s interesting, because the people they’re approaching to ask about UC – the reseller community – aren’t necessarily the people who have a real grasp of UC. That interconnect marketplace reseller community looks to companies such as Zeacom for expertise and for solutions.”

“There’s a lot of promotional noise abut UC on both the enterprise and SMB sides,” says Wallerstein. “But when the Fortune 2000 and SMBs refer to UC, they’re talking about the same technologies, but they’re not talking about the same solution providers. In the enterprise, people will buy, say, eight applications from Avaya or five apps from Cisco. SMBs, however, want one provider that can handle all of the aspects of UC. There’s a lot of demand at that level. But there’s not enough people out there who can architect an UC solution for SMBs, unlike the enterprise realm, where there are many people who can architect a UC solution, but at that level they’re delivering a solution that requires five or six different applications.”

“Now, in our view, a percentage of UC, especially in the current economy, is going to be delivered via a hosted service-type solution,” says Wallerstein. “But that percentage will be 15 percent or below. I always hear from analysts and companies that UC is going to migrate to the service provider world, but in the last five to ten years, other than Salesforce.com (News - Alert), I can’t point to a lot of solutions where hosted has been a major play in the marketplace, thought I think you’re starting to see a little bit of it in the case of speech recognition, where you can now see some front-end services involving the automatic speech recognition of voicemail or whatever with humans backing it up if the translation to text isn’t good enough. But when it comes to UC, the drivers for it – more efficiency out of your salesforce, better customer service, minimizing the amount of technical clutter – are core concerns. If I run a 500-employee company and I have 50 sales reps, I may be trying to figure out how to make those reps increase the revenue, or how I can continue my current revenue and drop down to 40 reps. To accomplish these things I’m looking at efficiency tools. I may be looking at Salesforce.com to make those people more efficient, but look at what’s involved with the core communications to my customers: a call coming in from my most important customer and I’m away from my desk, but I have my cell phone so my UC solution should do a couple things. It should offer my most important customer options other than play a message that says I’m away from my desk, which isn’t good enough for my best customer. It should identify the customer and then give him or her personal options, such as their own autoattendant, that says, ‘Hey there Richard, if you need to talk to me immediately, just press 1 to ring my cell phone. If it’s something my assistant can help you with, press 2.’ Or it could tell them I’m on vacation and they should press 3 to reach me at my house in the Hamptons. Now all of what I’m describing is too important to outsource, because its too ‘core’ to my business. So I actually see such advanced UC technology kept in-house instead of being delivered as a service.”

“Because UC appears to be such a clutter of different applications – unified messaging, presence, mobility, conferencing, contact centers – people are intimidated, so they may in fact look at a service provider to deliver UC,” says Wallerstein. “But companies such as Zeacom will tell them, ‘Don’t do that. You need to buy one app that can do everything you need for UC’.” IT

Richard Grigonis (News - Alert) is Executive Editor of TMC’s IP Communications Group.

Alcatel-Lucent - (www.alcatel-lucent.com)

CallTower - (www.calltower.com)

Covergence - (www.covergence.com)

NET Quintum (News - Alert) - (www.quintum.com)

RADVISION - (www.radvision.com)

Zeacom - (www.zeacom.com)

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