Convergence Vendors: 1 or 2?

Working with multiple vendors drives a competitive environment and greater innovations, while selecting a single vendor may provide some level of comfort and risk management. There is always a balance. Some say that IP telephony is an application running on an IP network, so you can select a vendor who is best in breed for telephony independent of networking vendor. Others say, you may want to go with a single vendor for telephony and networking because then you can ensure that performance requirements of voice are met. So is there a right answer?

Technology Is Not The End Game
Don’t accept vendor proposals at face value. Remember that if a vendor only has a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. If the vendor has no installed telephony base, he will argue that evolving to IP telephony ‘hybrid’ systems is a bad thing (for his revenue stream!); at the same time, he may argue that putting IP telephony call control in a ‘hybrid’ router is a good thing (for his revenue stream!). A data vendor may deeply discount its IP telephony offer, recovering lost revenues from network upgrades, after the deployment is started. Putting voice functionality into a data platform may sound attractive, but the economic life will be impacted. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. You need to do what’s right for your business, and ensure any business case incorporates all associated costs.

While you may intellectually accept that eventually everything on IP will permeate your business, you need to focus on business-driven migration to get there. This may be triggered by a new building construction or the termination of a Centrex contract; or driven by the need to reduce the cost of international voice calling or moves, adds, and changes (MACs); or by the opportunity to better equip your mobile workforce.

Lock-In Avoidance
Today, IP telephony has to fit into a multi-vendor environment of voice switching, voicemail, and contact center and CTI applications. But the industry is now talking about business-transforming unified communications across the virtual enterprise, embracing partners and customers. It’s a whole ecosystem that is multivendor by its very nature with interoperability through open standards including Web Services. In Nortel’s Architecture for the Converged Enterprise (ACE), IP telephony is positioned as a Communications Service, and is one element of unified communications, incorporating real-time multimedia capabilities and presence. Architecturally, the glue that ties unified communications together is the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).

Communications Services use the standard IP stack, including the Real-Time Protocol (RTP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) with standard-based QoS mechanisms. In addition, proactive voice quality monitoring tools are being standardized to facilitate service management. All this points to the fact that IP telephony can be successfully deployed and managed over any reliable QoS-enabled IP networking. In fact, our IP telephony solutions have been validated by third parties, to operate over other vendor’s IP networks (this is explicitly not the case for the IP telephony solutions from a dominant data vendor).

You need to probe vendors as to the proof points of their standard commitments, best demonstrated through multivendor interoperability. In this way, whether you go with a single or multivendor approach, you will be sure you are not locked in and have the flexibility to leverage innovations, or change vendors. In fact, some large institutions have chosen to have a dual vendor strategy in key areas (e.g., telephony and separately networking ) to leverage the most out a competitive environment, both in terms of TCO and technology.

One Or Two Suppliers?
There are very few vendors that can meet all of your IP telephony, multimedia, and network infrastructure needs. Given some recent mega-fiascos in the IP telephony space, you need to tread carefully! If you choose a single vendor for your convergence solution, do so with your eyes wide open to ensure that your current and future needs are met. And there’s no question — the future is SIP and unified communications. Different functions in the converged network will evolve at different rates. Integrating IP telephony into your data platforms could constrain this independent evolution. In any case, your network has to evolve to support the QoS and reliability needs of not just IP telephony applications. A vendor committed to multi-vendor interoperability is a lower risk in this evolution than one with a single vendor bent. Open standards support is critical to provide you the flexibility your business needs to avoid dependence on vendors and to leverage new technologies as they emerge. IT

Tony Rybczynski is Director of Strategic Enterprise Technologies at Nortel. He has over 30 years experience in the application of packet network technology. For more information, please visit www.nortel.com.