Getting the right foundations for Unified Communications

By ShoreTel

While IP telephony is moving into its second decade with enormous momentum, most users are still waiting for full convergence and voice-enabled applications. Increased
network efficiencies have been the primary benefit of IP telephony to date as enterprises struggle with infrastructure and organizational issues. These first-generation benefits have been considerable, but the focus is now shifting to converged applications, with the initial spotlight on Unified Communications (UC).

To achieve UC and other next-generation benefits, companies must build the right foundation, eliminate the voice silo, and make telephony a seamless part of information technology.

UC is a moving target right now, with various vendors using the term in different ways to emphasize a subset of an evolving group of capabilities. While these vendors naturally see UC from the perspective of their own product portfolios, what users really want is a rich and flexible communications system that meets particular business needs. They should be able to sample from a complete palette of UC capabilities, and not be restricted to a mere subset designed to enhance a particular vendor's existing products.

Just what is this full palette? Analysts at industry research firm Gartner have identified 16 features that comprise a complete UC solution:

(1) Telephony, (2) Unified Messaging, (3) Desktop Client, (4) e-mail, (5) Instant Messaging, (6) Audio Conferencing, (7) Video Conferencing, (8) Web Conferencing, (9) Converged Conferencing, (10) Notification Service, (11) Personal Assistant, (12) Rich Presence Service, (13) Communications-Enabled Business Processes, (14) Contact Center, (15) Mobile Solutions, and (16) Collaboration.

To get the full benefits of UC, businesses need to build a UC infrastructure that can integrate the best UC applications into a seamless UC environment. After all, UC is really about eliminating islands of communication. A communications system that integrates completely and easily into your desktop environment and your business processes can help transform the way you work and communicate.

Presence: The UC enabler
Presence is a key component of the UC paradigm. It enables you to find the best person available for live contact, and also shows you the state of the receiver so you can choose the best or richest communications mode. Presence is an absolute prerequisite for true UC, and the gap between theory and practice persists as presence technology continues to evolve.

• Basic presence is simply replacing traditional telephony's dial tone with a "user tone." While the dial tone tells you that the voice system is ready, the user tone tells you the user is ready.
• Rich presence combines multiple pieces of information about a user's state. For example, are you on the phone? Are you using your keyboard and thus at your computer? Rich presence also considers the various capabilities of different modes and devices.
• Contextual presence uses an individual's context to enhance the information provided about their availability. When people attend meetings their availability changes as they focus on the situation at hand. If you are focusing on a critical task, callers can be made to see your presence as unavailable, even though you are in your office using your computer and phone.
• Process presence adds another layer of abstraction, indicating the availability of someone who can fulfill a business specific role. For example, if there are three idividuals in the finance department who can answer a certain question, process presence would show you whether or not at least one of them was available or, like a traditional Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) system, provide information on the estimated wait time if they are busy.

Presence is a powerful concept that will change how we communicate, but its  evolutionary progress is currently constrained by single-vendor solutions that serve to enhance existing products. Instead, you need a communications infrastructure

that lets you assemble best-of-breed presence applications. This universal approach will also facilitate federation, which extends presence and other enhanced capabilities across enterprise and service provider boundaries to improve communications with partners, suppliers, contractors, and other third parties.

Aligning the infrastructure
Companies that are first to exploit presence and benefit from UC will have a big competitive advantage, so aligning your enterprise infrastructure to support them is critical. The phone system is the biggest stumbling block-an unwelcoming environment that has little history as an application development platform. To recast it as such, some vendors have moved the entire phone system to open application servers. However, in large enterprise environments this involves constructing huge server farms and increasing IT staffing to add the expertise required to manage these complex server environments.

The ideal IP telephony architecture for supporting UC is one that transcends the voice and data silos and is not limited or constrained by them. It offers high reliability and scalability while imposing a very reasonable total cost of ownership, and is fully distributed to enable location transparency. This IP telephony also allows easy integration of third-party communications applications, so you can build a UC environment from best of-breed products.

Mobility: A key real-time requirement
Mobility is a critical enabler, because you can't achieve ubiquitous real-time UC without it. It is also a major stumbling block. The wireless carriers want captive audiences inside a closed system, like the cable or satellite television systems. This creates communication barriers, especially as you move up the technology layers into enhanced applications.

Mobile UC has also been handicapped by the size and capabilities of handheld devices.

Fortunately, the smart phones that are flooding into the enterprise provide a much more suitable platform for mobile client software and telephony applications-particularly when they are used in conjunction with the newer generation 3G wireless networks.

Ultimately, 3G and its successors will enable even more advanced services for mobile phones, including video calls and seamless integration with enterprise WiFi networks.

In brief, the mobility component of UC shouldn't require users to change their behavior. Rather, it should give them the freedom to tie in whatever device and mode they have available at the moment. They should also be able to restrict access very granularly, and on an ad-hoc basis. They can be available at all times for the right level of caller, and do not have to send everyone the same out-of-office auto responder, or dump everyone indiscriminately into the same voicemail greeting.

Mobility contributes a great deal to the "reachability" aspect of UC. The integration of mobile technology into UC greatly increases both your accessibility and your ability to find the people you need quickly and easily. Mobile phones can already function as enterprise phone system extensions to some extent, enabling you to do directory dialing, and presenting your enterprise phone number as the caller ID for the calls you make.

Soon mobile phones will be able to provide presence information that covers both voice and real-time data (IM), and ultimately they will support multimedia applications.

Non-real-time communications
In sheer volume, non-real-time communications such as e-mail and voicemail dwarf their real-time counterparts, and the forthcoming video mail technologies can only tip the scale even more. Simply put, they eliminate the effort it takes to synch our lives up with the individuals we want to talk to, so we trade off the impact of real-time conversations for convenience.

As such, non-real-time communications and their superset, unified messaging will always be a huge component of UC. In UC terms, non-real-time communications are about the integration of e-mail, voicemail, and -ultimately-video mail, using existing enterprise contact directories as a common database.

Video communications
UC isn't complete without video, which enriches communications by engaging more of our senses simultaneously. While desktop video is starting to make an appearance, enterprise employees still typically add video to the mix rather non-spontaneously, by booking a videoconferencing room ahead of time and then moving to it to get into the video dimension. Video won't be a full-fledged component of UC until it is ubiquitous across desktops, laptops, and even handhelds so we can engage it on demand from our endpoint of choice and receive high-resolution images that aren't restricted to postage-stamp size.

Video's key contribution is letting us interact more completely with people we can't see in person. We can "meet" with remote individuals from wherever we happen to be. To accomplish this in the foreseeable future, video needs to support a range of resolutions, have low latency, and be tolerant of network quality issues.

ShoreTel is working on technologies that will make video more network-friendly, easier to use, and higher resolution. Improvements in video technology enable you to engage in video communication or any other type as easy as making a phone call, with the session taking place in the media that is available and preferred by both users.

Mixed-mode communications
Mixed-mode communications illustrate the remarkable flexibility of IP telephony and UC. The participants in a given communication session can be using different types of devices, and advances in technologies such as voice-to-text and text-to-voice conversion mean that they can even be using different modes.

Similarly, mobile participants will be able to shift seamlessly among modes as a conversation progresses. As you enter your office, calls get automatically handed off from the cellular network to your enterprise WiFi network or your desk phone. And the same process can occur in reverse when you have to leave the office during a conversation, or when you are moving to or from your home while talking. Today we have separate tools for different types of communications, and each has its own place to store a duplicate set of contacts.

As mixed-mode UC evolves, we see a unified directory with one entry per contact, a consolidated view of presence across all media, and ultimately a single tool for initiating communications across multiple media types.

The right architecture for real UC
Most IP telephony systems are essentially retrofits of technologies originally designed for a different purpose-either traditional data communications or traditional telephony.

This fundamental flaw has been compounded by aggressive enhancement-through-acquisition policies resulting in patchwork platforms with very apparent and often disabling seams.

Different UC capabilities may have their own interfaces, some of them resembling crude e-mail clients from many years ago. In sharp contrast, ShoreTel was not only designed from the ground up as an IP telephony system, but conceived with UC capabilities and business process integration in mind. Consequently, ShoreTel is UC friendly at its very core. ShoreTel's uniquely and fully distributed voice system makes presence available throughout the network. It is also an open system that is pre-integrated with Outlook and includes open APIs for integration with other applications.

While other IP telephony systems implement presence through interaction with ever longer and increasingly unwieldy buddy lists, ShoreTel delivers just-in-time presence. As you type in the first couple of letters of your target's name, ShoreTel starts matching them up with names in the directory, and the presence information is displayed immediately along with the names. In short, targeted information about specific people is made available just when you need it.

Conclusion
IP telephony platforms that were not designed with UC in mind are tacking UC capabilities on piecemeal, with all the attendant complexity, cost, and reliability problems that such an approach entails. Imagine trying to manage this mess while adding some of the more advanced UC technologies on the horizon, such as context sensors and business activity monitoring.

A lot of the buzz at IP telephony gatherings is now focusing on business process integration, which will be a lot easier to implement on an IP telephony system designed from its inception with such a capability in mind.

The ideal platform for UC in general is a fully converged IP telephony environment which includes best-of-breed UC capabilities and can easily incorporate others from third

parties. ShoreTel was the first to make key UC capabilities-presence, voicemail, and unified messaging-an integral part of an IP telephony system.

UC is really a name for what ShoreTel has been doing all along.

Contact details:
Tom Perry, Director of Marketing EMEA
T: +44 1628 826328, E: tperry@shoretel.com