January 1999

Can Enterprise Make The VoIP Leap?

BY MATTHEW FINNIE

Enterprise - long regarded as a major springboard for Voice over IP (VoIP) - was not swayed by the decreased communication costs that drove the first wave of IP telephony's success. Companies already enjoyed low rates, and they were reluctant to tamper with something so reliable as their phone service. For VoIP to succeed in this market, sophisticated solutions needed to be developed offering scalable, easy-to-administer, and user-friendly communications that would reduce cost and, perhaps more importantly, add value. VoIP now appears poised to deliver these practical enterprise solutions through the integration of the once separate PC and phone. Still, many questions remain pertaining to the killer applications of today and tomorrow and their potential success. What changes will they bring about? What hurdles must be overcome? Which products are necessary to make this vision a reality?

A LOOK AT THE PLAYING FIELD
Convergence, which describes this integration of the PC into a normal phone call, has the ability to add efficiency and functionality to communications and business processes. This is the type of added value the enterprise market needs, and it's up to VoIP to deliver, not to simply compete with traditional telecom service on cost alone.

The point is not to use the PC to replace the phone, but to enhance the functionality of the exchange. The most practical starting point is to incorporate PCs into a voice call, allowing them to do what they are best at: creating and displaying data that can be edited in real time from office productivity suites, e-mail, and Web-based applications. These are the real-time elements that need to be included in the call. The question then becomes: How does convergence add value to the communications process beyond the capabilities of current office tools?

BRIDGING THE GLOBAL GAP
It is assumed the ideal case for collaboration is face-to-face sharing of information. The traditional telephone network helped to bridge this gap with voice, then fax, and more recently e-mail. Adding real-time voice and collaborative data capabilities to the exchange is the logical next step. The following examples demonstrate how integrated communications solutions can overcome distances in the global workplace to enable real-time collaboration.

1. Today's Process
You e-mail a document concerning a project out for review. Comments are sent back from different parties and reviewed in follow-up phone conversations. Offline, a single person integrates the edits and the latest version is then e-mailed back to all parties, who then need to be contacted again in order to incorporate changes or sign off on the document.

Integrated Communications Solution
All parties pull up a view of the document on their PCs to discuss, and they make edits and changes in real time. All parties can then save and sign off the document at the end of the session, and any annotations or side remarks are kept as a record of the meeting. The document development stage is finished, and the project moves forward.

Integrated Benefits

• Less risk of misinterpretation.
• Faster conclusion to the review.
• Fewer man-hours and lower corresponding cost to complete tasks.

2. Today's Process
The sales force needs to be updated on a new product improvement and launch. They receive an e-mail and presentation or travel to a mutually convenient location (once all the calendars are synchronized) for a face-to-face presentation.

Integrated Communications Solution
The presentation and materials are e-mailed to all parties, and everyone agrees on a time (location is irrelevant). The presenter calls the salespeople online into a virtual conference. The presentation takes place, with everyone able to review the materials and see changes made in real time. Questions can be voiced or presented as text. The text record and whiteboard sessions are retained for future review.

Integrated Benefits

• More frequent and better informed communication with the sales force.
• Better management of time, resources, and money.

3. Today's Process
A weekly review of a call file containing action items related to a weekly sales meeting is needed. The list of items is updated and e-mailed to all participants as a reference for the weekly conference call.

Integrated Communications Solution
The action items list is e-mailed to all participants as part of the call. It is then used as the focal point of the meeting and is updated in real time. All participants leave with the updated information, plus any other details. The same file is used and updated on a weekly basis.

Integrated Benefits

• Everyone has the most up to date version.
• Everything gets updated in real time, avoiding after meeting debate about what was meant on a particular issue.

The above scenarios demonstrate the advantages that integrated solutions offer by allowing work teams dispersed around the world to collaborate as if they were in a single conference room. Setting up conference calls is normally time consuming, and when using an outside service it can often be expensive. VoIP eliminates the hassles and reduces these costs, while adding a collaborative dimension to increase productivity.

GOING OVER THE HURDLES
Despite these advantages, integrated communications solutions are not broadly distributed in today's enterprises. Until now, integrated products have not totally addressed the user's demand for ease of use and performance, except in limited deployments. Nor have these products met network administrators' demands for manageability. For integrated communications solutions to become mainstream, they have to add real value to the current business process while keeping pace with real-time expectations and administrative ease.

The adoption of integrated solutions has been stifled by a number of factors. For example, in a live presentation, the information being reviewed is expected to keep pace with the audio. Until recently, integrated communications solutions were only able to meet such performance demands by monopolizing limited bandwidth. As a result, integrated solutions have been confined to small deployments and niche applications.

Another consideration for PC communication to become mainstream is the need for simple and intuitive applications. To minimize the learning curve, these tools need to be a hybrid of the Windows desktop interface and incorporate commands and processes already familiar to users. The most daunting area for making these products user-friendly involves creating a simple way for users to set up calls and retrieve information. For example, calling multiple people should be as easy as typing the names of the participants. In addition, users need to be able to easily incorporate documents into a call. Retrieval of office documents and surfing the Web should be a one-click operation with a common view. This combines whiteboard, editing, and viewing functions into one consolidated workspace, regardless of the documents' native application.

Finally, letting real-time traffic loose on the enterprise without some control over use terrifies most IS managers. Integrated solutions therefore need to be manageable to enable a controlled roll-out and maintenance of service. In turn, managers must be able to define, relocate, and add network elements to move and update users without physically configuring each machine. It is also imperative that IS managers have a scalable solution that can start with a small 20-seat pilot and grow to full development.

THE LEAP - A CLIENT/GATEKEEPER ARCHITECTURE SOLUTION
Recent innovations are beginning to address performance, ease-of-use, and manageability shortcomings that have plagued integrated communications. One such innovation introduces new capabilities into communications clients to meet user performance and familiarity expectations. These new client capabilities are in part dependent on the development of a network architecture based on a combination of the H.323 gatekeeper and data networking standards, which introduces server elements into the network to handle administrator scalability and manageability needs.

Until recently, IP telephony was considered synonymous with gateways. Gateways are a fundamental building block for VoIP, but they are only part of the story. Their main role is to act as a bridge between IP networks and the PSTN. To address broader market needs for scalability, manageability, and enhanced services, a new line of H.323-defined products has recently been introduced, which includes advanced clients, specialized servers, and a standards-based gatekeeper. Together, these products provide IP telephony solutions capable of supporting thousands of gateways, gatekeepers, and clients performing advanced integrated communications services. This type of full solution includes the following components:

• Multimedia Clients: user-friendly and high-performance PC applications that enable real-time audio, data, and video communication.
• Gatekeeper: a server software solution that provides a platform for call management and advanced services. The gatekeeper keeps a log of all the online user locations and their current IP addresses.
• Conference Server: a multi-conferencing unit (MCU) allowing users to conduct multi-party audio conference calls through a PC or via a regular phone.
• Telephony Gateways: a bridge between IP networks and the PSTN.
• Network Manager: a client for centralized management of a global IP telephony deployment.

With this architecture, IS managers and service providers can deliver advanced communication solutions tailored to an organization's specific needs. Examples include:

• Telecommuting/working.
• Remote presentations/training.
• Collaborative working.
• Video conferencing.
• Complete office communications.
• Professional distance learning and training.
• Tele-medicine.
• Phone to phone toll bypass.
• Audio conferencing with real-time data sharing.

GREATER EASE AND PERFORMANCE
Foremost, it is the gatekeeper/client interaction that makes receiving and making calls simple. The client is installed on every target computer on the network in addition to an "always active" small listener program that resides on the users task tray. As soon as the user gets a valid IP connection, the listener registers with the company gatekeeper, which keeps a record (in memory) of all logged-on user e-mail and current IP addresses.

Placing a call from the client is easy. Through LDAP integration, the client can query the e-mail directory server to retrieve a unique ID for all users, removing the need to create a new companywide address book. This introduces a people-centric notion of e-mail into a voice call. Callers no longer need to know the physical location of the person they wish to call. All that is needed is an e-mail address or user name to make contact.

Client innovations make integrated collaborative environments usable by presenting users with a uniform interface capable of incorporating documents from multiple applications, whereas previous applications required users to negotiate between multiple windows and to master multiple rules. As for performance, key innovations in PC client solutions have decreased the bandwidth demands of these products, enabling their broad distribution and leading to critical development in the document sharing side of the application, specifically in:

• Data Transfer: The amount of data being transferred is minimized by leveraging existing OLE capabilities allowing for information within a document to be shared between multiple users, while supporting collaborative editing.
• Synchronization: Traditionally, call set-up and initial data transfer introduced long delays at the beginning of the call. A way of reducing the delay is to allow users to pre-send material to be discussed, which is consistent with current business practices. When the call is made, clients negotiate the most recent updates, which are then sent to all participants.

THE TALE OF THE TAPE
Integrated communications in the enterprise is the real value proposition that VoIP delivers, but this necessitates a complete end-to-end solution, not just a focus on the gateway. By using a comprehensive architecture - which must include a gatekeeper - new integrated communications solutions can be introduced that are intuitive and fast enough to keep pace with the complexity of modern business. Already, leading vendors are answering this market need. The race is on as VoIP advances on a market that will yield strong results for the companies and vendors who are up to speed on the uses and benefits of this technology.

Matthew Finnie is marketing director for VocalTec Communications. VocalTec software enables audio, video, data, text, and collaborative communications between personal computers and other devices over IP networks. For more information on VocalTec's integrated solutions, call 201 768-9400, or visit their Web site at www.vocaltec.com.