What's New & What's Next in Unified Communications
Simplicity, Tighter Integration, Collaboration, HD Voice & Cloud-based Offers are Key Trends

 

There have been many recent advances around unified communications - and networking in general, but the common thread that seems to run through all of them has to do with simplification. That includes both simplification of the user experience as well as simplification of management and application development.

 

From the user experience perspective, UC companies are delivering solutions that integrate a wide variety of communications capabilities so users can easily launch collaboration sessions within or between enterprises from either room-based systems or from their own desktop PCs or phones; feel as though they're in the same room as their far-flung colleagues via telepresence and/or HD audio communications; trigger and manage communications from within existing applications and interfaces; leverage popular social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter in new ways to communicate with coworkers and other peers; and enjoy the same UC features whether they're physically plugged in to the corporate network or are mobile or otherwise remote.

 

The industry and its customers are moving beyond a focus on plain vanilla IP telephony and instead looking at VoIP as part of a larger picture, which also includes unified communications and Web 2.0 social networking capabilities, says Bruce Morse, vice president of unified communications and collaboration at IBM Software Group. Along that track, he adds, we're seeing more back-end consolidation and front-end consolidation with single user interface and Web 2.0 capabilities.

 

To address the needs of IT and financial folks at businesses and service providers, companies in the UC space also are working to make communications more manageable and cost efficient by introducing new tools, interoperability platforms and efforts, and hosted and cloud-based solutions.

 

Several UC companies now offer conferencing and collaboration solutions that enable users to initiate audio or video sessions with one or multiple parties with a quick point-and-click operation. Many such solutions also include the ability to bring in new participants, applications and information sharing during the call itself.

 

While videoconferencing has traditionally been enabled by large, room-based systems, it's now expanding to the desktop, which allows for more integration with users' other applications. For example, Avistar Communications Corp. recently introduced the Avistar C3 Unified - Microsoft OCS Edition and the Avistar C3 Integrator - Citrix Edition solutions, two software-based videoconferencing solutions.

 

"The Avistar C3 Unified - Microsoft OCS Edition solution picks up where Microsoft OCS leaves off," says Avistar CTO Chris Lauwers. "Our solution extends Microsoft OCS and delivers a desktop visual communications experience that is vibrant, feature-rich and interoperable."

 

It enables direct interoperability between desktop video solutions and SIP- and H.323- enabled room solutions. The solution also supports presence multiparty videoconferencing and HD video resolution, and leverages Microsoft OCS presence and desktop integration features. The Avistar C3 Integrator - Citrix Edition, meanwhile, is a desktop videoconferencing solution designed specifically to run on the Citrix ICA protocol. It can be accessed through the Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp solutions as well as via Wyse thin terminals.

 

Another company offering PC-based videoconferencing solutions that can tie in with H.323 and SIP systems already in place at some businesses is Elluminate.

 

"Companies need to engage people where they need to collaborate with the equipment they have in a way that's effective," says Gary Dietz, senior product manager for Elluminate, adding that 85 to 90 percent of traveling employees in any business vertical want to do collaboration and conferencing on their laptops.

 

Video, which owned the spotlight in 2009, also is increasingly expanding to specialized desktop phones.

 

Polycom early last year introduced the VVX 1500, a SIP-based solution that integrates with the PBX and can be used as the main communications device on a user's desktop. It supports HD audio calls as well as videoconferencing.

 

Cisco Systems Inc. also recently unveiled two news phones, which Laurent Philonenko, vice president and general manager of the unified communications business unit at the networking giant, says reinvents what it means to be a phone.

 

The videoconferencing phones Cisco introduced in November feature big VGA screens, HD cameras, wideband audio, USB ports, and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities. Because they offer a USB, users can plug peripherals such as speakers into the devices. Because they include Wi-Fi, they can easily be moved because they're not physically plugged into the network. And because they include Bluetooth, users can easily move calls between these devices and cellular devices, Philonenko adds.

 

Even Alan Baratz, senior vice president and president of global communications solutions at Avaya, is talking about reinventing the desktop phone. He says that while CIOs would like to get rid of one of the three devices prevalent on most knowledge workers' desks - that device being the wireline phone - users like their phones. So Avaya is making the phone a chameleon with broadband functionality, he says, promising Avaya would announce more details on this front by the end of the first half of 2010.

 

Videoconferencing also is showing new momentum in terms of room-based systems. One of the exciting new areas on this front is the release of telepresence systems from such suppliers as BrightCom, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, LifeSize Communications Inc., Polycom and Tandberg, which Cisco was attempting to buy at press time.

 

Frost & Sullivan indicates the telepresence solutions and videoconferencing market is posed for strong growth, with the market expected to reach $4.7 billion by 2014. Of that total, the Asia-Pacific region is forecast to be a major market for telepresence and will account for more than one-third of the total market, or $1.7 billion in revenue, the report says.

 

Telepresence makes videoconference participants feel as though they're actually in the same room as their remote counterparts, a sensation Grace Kim, senior marketing manager with Cisco's collaboration software group, describes as "a more immersive experience" than that offered by your standard room-based solution. With telepresence, Kim explains, the participants at the other end of the connection are life-size, and communications are face-to-face and allow for eye contact.

 

Wideband Audio

Room-based videoconferencing systems have long employed high-definition technology, but now HD is conquering the audio space as well.

 

All of Skype's services today are based on the Skype wideband codec known as SILK, says Chris Moore, senior product manager for business at Skype. He adds that SILK is now going through IETF standardization.

 

Last year saw several wideband phones come onto the market and HD voice expanding into integrated services. And there's more to come on the HD voice front in 2010. Mike Storella, director of business development at snom, says the company has G.722 wideband in all of its phones, and its fourth-generation 800 Series phones have been optimized for HD.

 

Polycom also has continued its HD audio effort by unveiling the SoundPoint IP 335 desktop phone and the CX300 desktop phone. Tim Yankey, director of product marketing of voice communications solutions at Polycom, says now the company offers HD voice in a variety of products ranging from the high end to the lower end.

 

Also on the HD voice front, Vivox, which provides voice services to online game and social Web application developers, is licensing the royalty-free Polycom HD Siren 14/G 722.1C voice codec.

 

"This HD story is just starting to build," say Yankey.

 

There's also been a lot of talk in the industry about creating a peering capability involving HD voice. Jeff Rodman, Polycom's co-founder and CTO, says that could involve service providers doing a database dip so the network knows which endpoints are HD-capable.

 

"That HD voice is a wow factor among customers, and they really see the benefits of that right off the bat," says Dean Manzoori, vice president of marketing strategy at Broadcore, a hosted UC provider that uses Polycom phones for its services.

 

Daniel Berninger, CEO of Pulver.com's Free World Dialup, which has launched a project called HD connect to move wideband voice forward, believes that by the end 2010 HD voice will be a feature customers ask for and that by the end of 2013 everyone will have it.

 

Integration with Existing Apps

Whether an individual is communicating via voice, video, e-mail, IM, text, or whatever, UC platform and services providers want them to be able to focus on the message and the best way to convey it rather than concerning themselves with the technology side of the equation. So UC solutions providers this year continue their quest to emphasize - and deliver - new, more integrated unified communications solutions.

 

"Unified communications is about unifying your business process and really giving you better productivity of all of the communications services you have," explains Mohammad Nezarati, president and CEO of esnatech. "So when a call comes in, and I know that it's Paula calling, it would be useful to know that Paula has called three times this week, and these are the e-mails that Paula has sent me. So we have a search window that pops up automatically when we receive a new call that gives us a history of that call.

 

"We integrate with CRM systems in the back end," he continues. "We integrate with various different mail servers to integrate not only your mail but also your calendar and your contacts. So if I'm sitting in my car I can just hit a button and say the person's name, and it will connect me to that person right through my office PBX without me having to pay for that call on my cell phone. It's really about unifying all of the different communications fields."

 

And users need not be on the same application or matching endpoints, he adds.

 

"You could be on Google and I could be on Exchange and [someone else] could be on Lotus, and we could all be using our systems in a very similar way," says Nezarati. "Basically, you stay within the application platform you're most used to and you're comfortable in. We'll just enable that for you."

 

eOn Communications Corp., which sells IP PBX and contact center solutions to SMBs in the 20 to 700 employee range, has partnered with esnatech, which provides it with the UC and IM components. Jack Dienno, vice president of sales for eOn, says his company's platform ships with a quarter of the seats UC-enabled so customers can get a taste of the benefits of unified communications.

 

Social Networking

Of course, a wildly growing area of communications is social networking. As a result, UC companies have been hard at work figuring out how to bring social networking into the unified communications fold.

 

Among the companies championing this cause are Avaya and Siemens Enterprise Communications Group.

 

Speaking during the Avaya pre-conference seminar "The Social Enterprise - Are You Ready for It?" at ITEXPO Westest, Paul Dunay, global managing director of services and social marketing at Avaya and author of "Facebook Marketing for Dummies," noted that 5 billion minutes per day are spent on Facebook, which has surpassed e-mail in popularity. He added Facebook has 250 million users, which includes one out of five Internet users; is the Web's second largest video site; and lays claim to being the largest photo site, with 1 billion photos uploaded monthly.

 

Because Facebook and sites like it are populated by real people with real interests, marketers can potentially leverage that to deliver more targeted marketing and advertising, search and more, he says.

 

Social networking also can be a tool for individuals within a company or in partner companies to communicate. For example, an Avaya DevConnect partner potentially could develop new social networking applications that would bring new security and ease-of-use capabilities for business users to existing, popular sites like Facebook, says Reinhard Klemm, research scientist for collaborative applications research at Avaya Labs Research.

 

Siemens Enterprise Communications Group also has jumped on the social networking bandwagon, offering a new capability that marries social networking phenomenon Twitter and its own OpenScape unified messaging solution to allow tagged words in Tweets to launch or otherwise direct various types of communications sessions.

 

With this functionality an individual could use Twitter to broadcast that he's landed in San Francisco, for example, and is now available for a conference call. If the user were to tag the words "conference call now," the Tweet could not only alert his select user group of the arrival, it could also in its wake trigger OpenScape to launch a conference call with that group. Similarly, the system could use keywords paired with rules-based presence to garner that the user's announcement of his arrival was a queue to send all calls to voicemail for a half hour after his arrival so he'd have a chance to grab lunch and make his way to his destination.

 

But OpenScape's hooks into Twitter are just the tip of the iceberg, says Adrian Brooks, vice president of large enterprise and application strategy at Siemens. Social networking capabilities related to other sites could easily be linked with OpenScape, which is based on open standards including SIP, SOAP and XML. In fact, he says, it took just two weeks to do the Twitter integration.

 

Mobility & Presence

In addition to social networking, two other hot UC trends are mobility and presence.

 

According to David Puglia, chief technology officer of the enterprise business at Alcatel-Lucent, 70 percent of enterprise users are mobile, meaning they work remotely.

 

The rise of IP-enabled devices like smartphones means that rather than investing $1,500 per year, per user to manage Microsoft-based PCs, companies now can outfit their employees with smartphones, or netbooks, and realize tremendous savings because they don't have the overhead of license agreements, he says, and they can access their applications and services from the carrier cloud.

 

"Mobility is going to be big," he says. "It is big, and it's going to be huge."

 

Alcatel-Lucent also is working to tie contextual information into mobility, he says. The company this year expects to offer an upgrade to its current solution that can extract location and social information and contextual data so, for example, if a corporation wanted to identify and connect everyone working on a particular initiative, it could do so in an automated way via UC.

 

The Cloud

Puglia touches on yet another big trend in UC, which is the expansion of unified communications services into the carrier network cloud. Moving applications and services from the customer premises into the carrier cloud can enable companies to save both in terms of capital and operational expenditures, proponents of the model argue.

 

Among the companies offering such services are Alteva, Broadcore, Cbeyond, PosTrack and Whaleback Systems.

 

Dean Manzoori, vice president of marketing strategy at Broadcore, which sells UC services packaged with broadband connectivity to SMBs nationwide, says there's still some adoption that needs to happen on this front, but that "we are at the cusp of businesses understanding the benefits" of UC from the cloud.

 

Big names like Amazon and Google also have been active in offering a variety of communications services from the cloud, and it sounds like there's plenty more to come. Google currently offers cloud-based e-mail, calendaring, document management and other features. And as of press time in mid January the company was in beta with Google Voice and Google Wave.

 

Lars Rasmussen, one of the Google Wave team leads and a software engineering manager at the search and online advertising giant, explains that a Wave is a shared object.

 

"Instead of users participating in a Wave - and you can think of a Wave as being half way between a document and a conversation - a Wave is a tree structure of messages," he tells UC magazine. "Each participant can add and remove messages; and they can edit existing messages. That's really all there is to it. It sounds very, very simple, but it turns out that there is a very broad range of utility in these Waves.

 

"We have this ridiculously long demo that we did at our developers' conference back in May where we go through and show how this Wave object can be used to have conversations like you would in e-mail, or on a bulletin board," he says. "And you can have conversations like you would on an instant messaging system. But because you can edit messages - even each other's messages - you can use it to collaborate on content by editing it, even at the same time.

 

"You can use it to put together photo albums. We have the extensibility mechanisms so that third parties can add types of content to it, from games to drawing surfaces," he says. "One of our favorite demos came from SAP to build a business processing modeling tool on top of it."

 

Interoperability and Transcoding

The issues of interoperability, management, security and control are not particularly sexy, but we're started to hear more about them as they apply to UC as well.

 

For example, given the wide range of codecs in use and the cornucopia of endpoints and user applications now available, there's a need for normalization so end users don't need to concern themselves with such issues, says Matthew Krueger, vice president of marketing and business development at Network Equipment Technologies.

 

"The codec should be the least of anyone's concern," says Krueger, adding that NET is focused on delivering solutions that allow everything to work together in the network so customers can continue buying best-of-breed products.

 

Acme Packet, Cisco and Genband are among the other companies focused on interoperability and transcoding for UC.

 

Cisco's Philonenko says one barrier for ubiquitous unified communications is that when users collaborate with those outside their organizations they lose some of their capabilities. To address that, Cisco late in 2009 introduced a gateway, called the Cisco Intercompany Media Engine, which sits at the edge of enterprise networks to establish peer-to-peer relationships with similar gateways at other enterprises.

 

Cisco also recently unveiled the Intercompany Cisco Telepresence Directory, a Cisco-hosted directory of endpoints, organizations and people with access to Cisco TelePresence endpoints. The directory features a virtual assistant to help schedule meetings across the more than 1,200 rooms at more than 80 customers using intercompany Cisco TelePresence.

 

In yet another move to allow for interoperability of UC, Cisco has introduced Session Management Edition of Cisco Unified Communications Manager, which provides SIP session management at the call control level so PBXs from different suppliers can work together, share the same features, operate under a single management umbrella and enjoy the benefits of SIP trunking.

 

Meanwhile, Adobe has expanded the PBX integration capabilities of its Acrobat Connect Pro Web conferencing solution.

 

Peter Ryce, technical evangelist for Acrobat Connect Pro, says the Web conferencing solution has had telephony integration with solutions from such companies as Avaya, Cisco and Premiere Global Services, but that Adobe has expanded on that by also doing "tight integration" with InterCall. This integration outfits meeting participants with such capabilities as the ability to dial out to individuals, see who's talking, mute people and put them on hold - all through a visual user interface using XML Web services on the back end talking to InterCall (or other telephony integration partner) servers, Ryce explains.

 

Additionally, Adobe now offers a new feature called Universal Voice that allows the Connect meeting to dial a 1-800 number to bring conferencing service providers into the mix. Adobe added media gateway functionality to its server, which acts as a bridge for transport protocols, using SIP and RTP to make the outbound communication with the conferencing service provider. That service provider then returns something like G.711 audio, and the Adobe server converts that to Flash audio, and broadcasts it within the meeting room.

 

"We recognize there are hundreds of audioconferencing service providers, so there's no way we could have that integration and relationship with all of them," says Ryce. "And yet for many customers, they are more wedded to their audioconferencing than they are to any particular Web conferencing. So for those customers we have a new thing that's called Universal Voice."

 

Management

Being able to manage multiple PBXs and UC applications from a single system also can enable businesses to lower significantly their communications costs, says Steve Hardy, director of global product marketing for unified communications solutions at Avaya.

 

"For large enterprises there's a lot of savings potential," he says, adding Avaya's Aura platform also can enable a company to use a single feature server to support multiple locations.

 

To ensure customers get the experience they expect with UC, network operators also need to know what's going on in their networks both at a high level and in more detail, says Jay Botelho, director of product management at WildPackets, who notes the importance of ensuring network and application performance to support unified communications.

 

Patrick Sweeney, vice president of product management at Sonic- WALL Inc., agrees. The company recently unveiled a VoIP firewall that employs deep packet inspection to enable special treatment for certain applications, such as giving priority to voice, without adding latency.

 

Joe Frost, vice president of marketing of Psytechnics, says new tools for customer service representatives also can help ensure a high-level customer experience. For example, the company's new Service Desk Manager runs nightly reports so service desk personnel during non-peak times can review call quality (and flags for issues that might need attention) records so they can escalate potential problems to be addressed before customers file complaints.