Enterprise
Migration Was Moving At VoiceCon 2004
2004 may well be the turnaround year for the enterprise voice communications
industry, if the standing room only audiences at Business Communications
Review’s 14th Annual Conference early this month in Orlando are
an indicator. With a 50 percent increase in attendance over past years, more
than 1,200 people filled every main session, and hundreds participated in
the concurrent sessions that covered key issues in the migration of
traditional telephone communications to a converged, IP-based infrastructure
(VoIP). It was estimated that almost half of the attendees were enterprise
technology managers seriously thinking about migrating to VoIP and IP
telephony applications.
Of course, BCR’s reputation
for objectivity and their well-organized program played a key role in the
success of this landmark conference. In particular, all conference speakers
were challenged to deal with “hard” issues and questions, rather than dish
out “hype” about technology offerings.
There was an awful lot of
excitement and a lot of issues discussed in a few days and we couldn’t sit
in on all the sessions. So, we can only give you some highlights affecting
practical enterprise migration toward unified/converged communications.
WHERE'S THE ROI? THE
SHIFT FROM JUST REDUCING COSTS
In the last few years of economic belt-tightening, most organizations
would not consider any technology expenditures unless there was a
significant cost-saving benefit. The experience of users presented at the
conference confirmed that such cost savings are real and significant,
particularly for distributed organizations. This applies not only to remote
branch locations, but also to home workers (teleworkers) and to mobile
workers.
Hard dollar, cost-reducing
benefits of VoIP infrastructure cited by conference speakers included:
·
Consolidation of network infrastructure, hardware platforms,
and server software;
·
Centralization and reduction in technology management support
and administration* for remote sites;
·
Easier and less expensive integration of telephony and data
functions (CTI) for communication applications;
·
Reduction of office workspace costs for teleworkers;
·
Reduction of travel costs for meetings; and
·
Reduction of long-distance services (toll bypass) between
sites and through IP-based connections and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).
* It was noted by one
speaker that a traditional cost savings cited for office telephones because
of Moves, Adds, and Changes (MAC) is not necessarily a useful metric for an
organization that doesn’t move many people between offices.
Aside from cost savings
that can be realized by converged communications infrastructures and reduced
technology support, there has been a shift of focus towards “productivity.”
It was acknowledged by many speakers that it is now time to recognize that
“soft dollar” benefits are equally important to include as ROI. Most of the
discussions centered on individual user productivity (“micro-productivity”),
where personal time-savings resulted from easier and faster procedures for
communicating with other people. There was also consideration given to
correlating better “contact center” customer communications with revenue
generation.
What we didn’t hear anyone
talk about is the ROI that accrues from faster task completion of enterprise
groups because of more effective collaborative person-to-person
communications (what we have termed “macro-productivity”). This kind of
communication includes ad hoc conferencing, call/message notification and
delivery, and exploiting wireless accessibility. “Macro-productivity” is a
new metric that may now be possible to apply because of new communication
standards like session initiation protocol (SIP),
presence/availability/modality management servers, and will be more directly
applicable to enterprise-level payoff.
Finally, another
justification for migration is to be found in the “insurance” value of
business continuity. As Andy Brown, a VP at Merrill Lynch, pointed out,
their experience after 9/11 made VoIP infrastructure a key requirement for
ensuring rapid business resumption after a catastrophic disruption.
WHERE ARE THE
"APPLICATIONS?"
However, up to now, such potential cost savings and benefits have not been
enough to drive the enterprise market to buy into simply replacing TDM
telephone systems with VoIP networks, IP telephony servers, and desktop IP
phones. Unless end users get noticeable benefits too, there will be no
demand for change. The technology providers have long promised that the real
ROI benefits for VoIP will come from increased “productivity” from
communication “applications” and the BCR conference leaders pushed hard on
that question. Most of the speakers and panelists acknowledged that such
productivity ROI from “communication applications” would really come from
the benefits that individual end users and groups will realize from specific
communication features and functions.
We see such enterprise
“communication applications” traditionally falling into two general areas;
individual user (person-to-person) directed contacts and contacts between a
customer and an enterprise group, better known as “contact center”
activities. Communication modalities, such as real-time voice calls, instant
messaging, and asynchronous messaging, etc., then become functional options
for the applications. As communication devices become multi-modal at the
desktop and for mobile, handheld use, the traditional differences between
modalities will blur even more. Enterprise call and message management
functions will blend together under multi-modal contact management (“unified
communications”) for both person-to-person and customer contacts.
However, even these two
“application” domains will be overlapping as IP-based convergence enables
the traditional “formal” call center functions to be extended to the
“informal,” enterprise-wide, virtual contact center. Indeed, speakers cited
the contact center application as a primary source of revenue-generating ROI
productivity through customer satisfaction and retention. This is where
strategic call/message routing, mobile accessibility, customer context
“screen-pops,” and consolidating all customer activity data will all help
maximize available enterprise staff resources to selectively accommodate new
multi-modal, customer-facing contact demands.
Within each of these two
primary “communication applications” are a variety of features and
functions, some through the “basic” call server switching functions, others
provided through ancillary software servers. Unfortunately, the industry
still calls many functions an “application!” With the flexibility of SIP for
real-time contacts, presence for availability management and cross-modal
access to people (and their multi-modal devices), the basic “communication
applications” will simply become improved with more effective functionality
and greater interoperability between communication modalities. However, we
also see the customization of user interface needs, for both contact
initiators and recipients, for vertical markets as becoming the true
“applications” that the industry will start to produce in the future. But,
we didn’t hear too much about that!
STANDARD SIP AND
"PROPRIETARY SIP"
When it comes to communication applications, every speaker enthusiastically
acknowledged the arrival of flexible end-to-end real-time connections
through the still-evolving SIP standard. Because stateless SIP can exploit
presence, availability and modality information to establish contacts with a
variety of communication devices regardless of content, it is being hailed
as the real enabler of effective communication between end users. Leading
industry providers like Siemens, Microsoft, and even newcomers like
Interactive Intelligence were quick to tout their early exploitation of SIP,
but all the others like Nortel Networks, Avaya, and Mitel have been quickly
following suit. We noticed that most vendors are now starting to call their
“hard phone” devices “SIP phones,” rather than just “IP phones.”
Although well-known
consultant Allan Sulkin pointed out that many of the “new” functional
capabilities have been available in the past, the real benefit of VoIP and
SIP are that such features can now be provided much more easily and at much
less cost. The “CTI” of the past was way too difficult and expensive to get
implemented by the enterprise market. Now the way is clear to implement our
visions in the past, as well as new capabilities that we never even
considered.
The current “fly” in the
SIP ointment is that technology providers are implementing non-standard
extensions to “basic” SIP functions, which may delay universal
interoperability between end user devices and communication services. The
industry hope is that “SIP federation” will help extend the power of SIP
across systems and networks.
Part 2
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