January 2000

BY TONY RYBCZYNSKI

The industry is abuzz with vendors promoting voice/data convergence strategies. While all the noise can be irksome, some strategies merit a careful hearing. For example, some strategies are defined by business needs, as opposed to technological limitations. Needless to say, the former should be in harmony with the goals of your enterprise. The latter, however may sound a false note.

Some router and LAN vendors claim that IP telephony is about free voice (and a few features like conferencing and voice mail); that IP telephony is just another IP application (and that IP networks are inherently more reliable than voice networks); and that wireless telephony demonstrates how willingly users tolerate poorer voice quality.

On the other hand, vendors with experience in telephony networking and end user/vertical market applications suggest that the real value of IP telephony is in new connectivity options and new applications; that existing IP infrastructures need to be rethought to support IP telephony reliability and performance requirements; and that high quality voice needs to be maintained for business environments (unless significant new value is delivered).

And so the debate among vendors continues. All the while, enterprise users are left wondering what all the fuss is about. Why should they care about the convergence of data and telephony? Where’s the payoff?

COMMON PREMISES
While the marketplace admits a variety of convergence schemes, most people agree on at least a few basic premises, starting with the general outlines of the Internet’s evolution. Let’s start with the big picture. A few years ago, the Internet was an academic tool. In fact, advertising on the Internet was frowned on.
Eventually, the Internet opened up. Browsing technologies were invented, and we suddenly had a worldwide information warehouse, a new surfing language, and www.anyname.com everywhere.

These trends take us up to the present, where we are now in the midst of a second movement towards a more accessible Internet. Today, the Internet is becoming a transactional marketplace, which is the most visible indicator of how business is being transformed into the e-business model. The next wave is already gathering force as the Internet goes interactive, enriching how people communicate in real-time.

The market pull for this new wave is the need to add the human touch to e-business and to provide tools for the distributed workforce. The technology push comes from IP telephony technologies. So, how do these facts influence the enterprise view of convergence?

GENERAL GOALS
Innovations furthering convergence in the Internet space are of especial interest to forward-thinking CEOs. To these executives, convergence suggests new ways to accomplish abiding goals: setting new standards in customer loyalty and satisfaction, rapidly delivering new products to existing and emerging markets, retaining and attracting skilled resources, and enhancing employee satisfaction and productivity.

To attain these goals, CEOs have emphasized investments in supplier and customer integration. Such investments lead to integrated business systems, which constitute the kernel of an e-business model. And such a model is deemed essential for success in the Internet age.

A testament to the compelling economic and competitive benefits of convergence is the accelerated development of Internet-enabled customer-care applications. Such applications may well help businesses realize the vast potential of Internet e-commerce.

An early milestone is to replicate the success of traditional call centers. Today, the amount of business conducted through call centers approaches $1,000 billion, dwarfing the amount of consumer-to-business and business-to-business transactions conducted over the Internet. And yet this number may be surpassed by Internet e-commerce within a few years.

Success on this scale depends on the integration of customer care centers and Web technology, said integration allowing the customer to interact in whatever mode seems most attractive at any given time. (These modes include chat, e-mail, fax, and telephony).

The importance of facilitating customer interactions to this extent is supported by several studies. One such study, by Ernst and Young, ranked the reasons for not closing a deal online as follows:

1. unresolved concerns over credit card privacy;
2. the unfulfilled need to see the product first-hand;
3. the unfulfilled desire to talk to a person.

THE PARTICULARS OF IMPLEMENTATION
While CEOs may define business needs, satisfying these needs falls to another category of executive, the CIO. And, in fulfilling their assigned role, CIOs rely on information technology. This progression has been pronounced in certain industries, such as finance. Now, however, companies of all types are building their businesses around their networks and networked application environments.

CIOs recognize that the emerging e-business environment is driving the need for short time-to-market for new applications, improved price/performance, increased reliability and scalability, and management simplification. The business case for convergence is best discussed by looking at three distinct dimensions to IT’s environment: applications, infrastructure, and management.

At The Application Level
At the application level, it is widely accepted that new applications, whatever their form, will be developed on IP, and that existing applications should be migrated to IP as best suits a business’s specific needs. IP telephony technologies will enable a whole new range of unified application and interpersonal communications services.

internet-enabled call center applications (including remote virtual agents, collaborative applications supporting a distributed employee/partner/supplier base, and training in all its varied forms) provide an example of new real-time interactive applications that will run on IP. These applications need to be blended seamlessly with unified messaging supporting voice, e-mail, and fax communications; however, the real-time nature of these applications introduces some new infrastructure demands for time-critical performance and reliability.

At The Infrastructure Level
Since IT managers are increasingly measured on time-to-market for new applications, in addition to more traditional metrics tied to budget and trouble resolution times, having a multi-service enterprise networking infrastructure that is application ready is critical. With the growing diversity of applications in terms of both their performance needs and their business criticality, the enterprise networking infrastructure needs to deliver rock-solid reliability.

Convergence is the means to the end: in this case, achieving the highest levels of price/performance and the highest levels of affordable network reliability. This end should be addressed holistically at the switch and network level, and it should be supported by proactive network management. The degree of redundancy has to be set by the enterprise, again, commensurate to its business needs.

Likewise, the infrastructure needs to provide preferential treatment for mission-critical and latency dependent traffic and differential treatment to non-critical traffic, under both congestion and failure conditions. This treatment should also be addressed holistically at the switch and network levels, supported by system-wide policy management interfaced to enterprise directories.

Convergence of voice and data over widely dispersed or international WANs, both between major sites and out to remote sites, generally provides positive payback. In in-building environments, convergence can take the form of leveraging the plug-and-play nature of LANs in the form of IP-enabling classic telephony communication systems (i.e., PBXs) or telephony enabling IP networks. The choice will be driven by end user needs for features/functionality offered on IP telephones and soft clients, and by economic and installed base considerations.

At The Management Level
While applications are the final goal and the network infrastructure is the way to provide the required connectivity, people costs continue to be a significant portion of the IT budget — as much as 40 percent in many cases. Converged voice/data IT organizations can better manage the transition to unified applications and infrastructures, which can go a long way towards justifying cross-training of telephony and data resources with their strengths in understanding the end user and network respectively.

Operational procedures have to reflect the growing business criticality of certain applications. Comprehensive management systems with uniform GUIs incorporating network, policy, and service management not only improve overall network performance but also permit better use of scarce human resources.

Bottom line: convergence in the form of unified management, infrastructures, and applications can deliver business critical availability, application-optimized performance, and lower lifecycle costs, including operations, capital per bit of capacity, and bandwidth costs.

GETTING STARTED
So what is an enterprise IT manager to do? The IT manager needs to identify the opportunities presented by convergence at the application, infrastructure, and management levels and establish nearer-term strategies, which could include some hot unified applications, preparing the infrastructure for convergence and organizational consolidation (if this has not already been done). In implementing the strategy, the IT manager should consider:

• Leveraging the data/telephony knowledge within the enterprise, to identify the demands that e-business, IP telephony, and unified applications will place on IP networking infrastructures in areas such as reliability and performance. This could lead to (re-)architecting the networking infrastructure to be application ready, through the right mix of the telephony enablement of the enterprise IP network and the IP enablement of classic telephony.
• Leveraging the PBX, CTI, and customer care application skills in the organization to drive the features and functionality required of e-commerce, distributed workforce, and mobility solutions to meet user and application needs, including interoperability with the installed base of telephony systems
• Leveraging relationships with VARs, system integrators, and vendors to develop effective network, policy, and service level management systems.

REAPING THE BENEFITS OF CONVERGENCE
Enterprise users exploring convergence should consider various kinds of benefits:

• At the application level, convergence adds the human touch to e-commerce solutions and provides tools to the distributed workforce for increased competitiveness and profitability.
• At the infrastructure level, convergence delivers reduced complexity and the highest affordable network availability and price/performance. Also, it minimizes the time-to-market for new apps.
• At the management level, convergence provides the tools required to more effectively configure and manage the network. The ultimate objective is to meet the connectivity, reliability, and performance needs of applications and users. In short, the goal is to make optimal use of network resources.

Tony Rybczynski is director of strategic marketing and technologies for Nortel Networks’ Enterprise Solutions unit. This business unit offers a full range of enterprise terminal, workgroup, campus, and wide-area unified networks and applications, through direct and indirect channels. For more information, visit the company’s Web site at www.nortelnetworks.com. E-mail questions or comments to [email protected].