Ph 1300 36 12 36

While IP telephony is moving into its second decade with enormous momentum, 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 organisational 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. However, UC is a moving target right now, with various vendors using the term in different ways to emphasise a subset of an evolving group of capabilities.

UC ultimately has the ability to enable users to increase their productivity through enhanced efficiency in communication and integration with applications.

Analysts at industry research firm Gartner have identified 16 features that comprise a complete UC solution:

One obvious advantage to UC is presence enabled communications, allowing the user to determine if someone is online and therefore available for a voice conversation (Presence) regardless of their geographic location, and chooses to use a communication mode that makes the interruption less disruptive such as IM. Presence is a key component of the UC paradigm and an absolute requirement for true UC.

Aligning your enterprise infrastructure to support UC is critical.

The traditional phone system has little history as an application development platform. To recast it as such, some telephony manufacturers have moved the entire phone system to open application servers. However, this involves constructing server farms and increasing IT staffing to add the expertise required to manage these complex server environments.

General-purpose servers also decrease the reliability and availability of communications systems.

The operating systems are rife with vulnerabilities and the server hardware components particularly disk drives decrease the system’s mean time between failures (MTBF) considerably. The server issues are compounded by the acquisitions path most IP telephony manufacturers have taken to build and enhance their voice platforms. Voice over IP (VoIP) and UC capabilities developed separately by different companies get cobbled together, often somewhat tenuously. The result is a highly complex amalgamation of discrete, disjointed components that are difficult and expensive to implement, manage, and upgrade.

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 that result in patchwork platforms with very apparent, and often disabling, seams.

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