The dawn of unified communications

The recession is forcing businesses to search for ways to cut costs - and unified comms is one place many will start, says Quocirca's Bob Tarzey.

As politicians quibble about whether a recession is turning into a depression, businesses are more focused on the bottom line. For IT departments this means two things: cutting their own costs and helping the broader business to cut its costs. Achieving the latter will serve the long term reputation of IT well.

This has led to a renewed focus from vendors on unified communications (UC) - also known as IP convergence, unified messaging and a host of similar terms.

Definitions of UC vary depending on who you talk to but broadly speaking it involves the pulling together of traditional IP-based communications such as email, IM and web conferencing with voice communications (both fixed line and mobile), video conferencing and a plethora of communication tools that have arisen under the web 2.0 banner.

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The purported cost savings from UC come from reduced cost of voice calls (internal calls are essentially free), lower cost infrastructure that is easier to manage (just one network for voice and data) and more efficient communications between employees and outsiders who are better able to find each other through presence capabilities that indicate if someone is available and how best to contact them.

There is nothing new about this. The idea of converging voice and data communications has been around for years and some businesses are well down the road to adopting it. However, others are held back by internal politics, as voice communications are often run by a separate department from IT. Add to this scepticism grounded in the historic inability of IT departments to deliver high performance and reliability, and there is understandable concern about putting all the networking eggs in one IT basket.

However, if these issues can be overcome, it is the IT department that will deploy UC. It will run over its data network, make use of the processing power of much of its existing hardware and will involve software integration, an area where IT teams have plenty of experience.

The starting point for UC is the underlying platform - to date this has usually been a replacement PBX (private branch exchange) that supports IP but there are now alternative approaches.

Traditional telephony vendors all now have IP PBXs that link to internal IP networks and interface with external PSTNs. These include Avaya's Unified Communications range and the Alcatel-Lucent's Converged Telephony Server, which given their background, tend to be strong on the voice side and weaker when it comes to IP applications.

Cisco, ever keen to drive more traffic across the IP networks it has had so much success in selling, has also created its own UC division. Its Call Manager range of products do a good job of bridging the gap between old-style and new-style telephony, but Cisco is also keen to sell as many of its flashy, if expensive IP phones as possible, which the buyer may not need.

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