Beyond Voice

As business needs evolve, enterprises demand more from IP telephony. Lower

cost, high-quality and reliable voice services are not enough. The need for

better productivity calls for more features such as messaging with presence

capabilities, conferencing, and tight integration with business applications

such as order management and CRM.

While these capabilities benefit all types of enterprises, enabling them is

never easy. The current IP telephony environment model requires customers to

dedicate standalone servers to support each function of the telephony suite.

This presents integration and system management challenges, along with the cost

issues prevalent among small and medium-sized businesses, which have limited

budgets and IT resources.

Making advanced IP telephony accessible to businesses of all sizes requires

an all-in-one platform that delivers a complete and easy-to-manage solution. The

platform must be able to deliver powerful, yet cost-efficient

productivity-enhancing services and support converged business environments for

enhanced collaboration among employees, customers, and business partners.

Cost-effective Convergence



The idea to transform IP telephony into an advanced enterprise application

is what our VCX platform is all about. The VCX platform runs both voice and data

applications on a secure network, with a common infrastructure for

authentication, call control, presence, audio/video conferencing and management.

Based on end-to-end session initiation protocol (SIP) signaling, the

architecture facilitates seamless integration with any existing private branch

exchange (PBX) infrastructure to protect the existing investments. Moreover, the

VCX architecture was designed from the ground to support geographically

dispersed campus and branch environments and to extend all capabilities of the

IP telephony suite across the entire enterprise network.

To meet the needs of distributed enterprises, the voice boundary routing

architecture was developed, a feature of the VCX platform that delivers the

scalability, flexibility, and reliability needed to support all users across the

enterprise. Operating in a centralized or distributed fashion, the VCX platform

can scale from as few as fifty to thousands of phones. With redundancy at many

levels, it guarantees availability even when individual components fail or WAN

connectivity is lost.

The VCX voice boundary routing architecture deploys call processing in a

hierarchical manner. Call processors and media gateways are installed at branch

offices, which are then connected to the regional office call processor for

redundancy, centralized routing, messaging, applications, and global directory

services.

A regional office provides call processing for thousands of users or hundreds

of branches, enabling connectivity to public switched telephone network (PSTN)

and supporting either local or geographically dispersed redundancy. It also

supports centralized applications such as messaging, conferencing, instant

messaging, and presence.

Branch offices, on the other hand, can deploy cost-effective media gateways,

supporting both analog and digital connectivity to the PSTN for local calls and

emergency use. The call processors deployed at branch offices support specific

sets of users, with individual dial plans and routing configurations, but also

have redundancy to call the central site, access local and global user

directories, and enable inter-regional and inter-branch dialing.

The branch office call processors are made redundant with the primary server

of the regional office. If the messaging application is used at the branch

offices, for instance, it automatically archives messaging data to the regional

office messaging system. The VCX platform also supports remote sites connected

to regional or branch offices (for call processing) that have IP phones and

gateways but no call processors.

Why VCX?



One of the most obvious benefits of the VCX is that businesses now maintain

a single communications infrastructure across multiple offices instead of

various disparate ones. This translates to a reduced total cost of ownership as

converged systems are easier to manage and modify according to business demands.

Companies can also save on long-distance costs by relying on local area

networks (LANs) and wide area network (WAN) connectivity instead of PSTN. As the

system is implemented throughout the organization, companies can benefit from

centralized administration, configuration and management capabilities, which

result in lower installation and operating costs as well as more optimized IT

resources.

Additionally, because they integrate with platforms that are easy to operate

and maintain, your IP solution can support all critical business applications

within a single, integrated system. Platforms that embrace open standards give

organizations broader choices and greater capability to leverage legacy systems,

thereby eliminating additional server costs and management complexity.

Leveraging the various unified messaging tools that the VCX supports will

increase business productivity by enhancing communication and collaboration

among employees, customers, and partners. These may include voice mail/email/fax

integration and find-me/follow-me capabilities; presence-enabled instant

messaging and highly scalable audio conferencing capabilities. For service

oriented businesses, VCX can also support contact center platforms for enhanced

customer service and revenue generation. As the IP telephony solution is built

on an open architecture and industry standards such as SIP, it provides greater

flexibility to connect to third-party business applications.

It is important to note that any IP telephony solution supporting open

standards gives customers greater freedom in their choice of IP handsets, media

gateways and applications. Many third-party components and applications have

been certified to interoperate with the VCX platform, giving customers the

option to deploy best-in-class solutions and not be locked into a particular

vendor's technology.

Different businesses advance at different rates. While it is true that

advancements in IP telephony enable companies to implement next-generation,

multimedia IP communications systems using the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

SIP standard, an organization may not need such functionality yet. By supporting

features traditionally supplied by PBX systems, the VCX platform helps

organizations migrate to an open, IP-based communications system at their own

pace and and in support of their business objectives.

In terms of security, the VCX IP telephony solution operates on a Linux

operating system with additional security measures on industry-standard

enterprise-grade servers. A choice of servers is also available to provide the

optimum reliability and performance characteristics based on your needs.

Adoption of IP Telephony



Many enterprises no longer have the luxury of operating disparate networks

because today's economic challenges and competitive landscape make

differentiation pivotal for success. While the use of converged communication

solutions is clearly growing, this technology is still in its early stages. By

using converged communication solutions, organizations are building the

foundation for a next-generation communication world of potential value-added

applications and collaboration tools.

Therefore, converged IP communication or IP telephony has gone to the next

level, beyond VoIP and first-generation IP telephony. It is more than just a

basic dial tone; business advantages are driven by increased productivity and

enhanced communication and collaboration among employees, customers, and

partners. These benefits result from cutting-edge IP-based applications. Unified

messaging offers IP telephony users voice mail/email/fax integration and

find-me/follow-me capabilities. Advanced collaborative applications such as

instant messaging, presence, and highly scalable audio conferencing capabilities

save time and effort. IP contact centers help drive customer satisfaction and

business revenue. IP telephony solutions, built on open architectures and

industry standards such as SIP, also provide the most flexibility to connect to

the third-party applications the business requires.

These are the new methods of communications. They are what leading

enterprises do to connect groups of employees, customers, and partners. Even

though progress is going to be gradual, most analyst reports suggest that

adoption of these applications is gaining momentum. For example, 34% of

organizations that are using converged IP communication solutions have also

deployed these rich collaboration tools and applications. A phenomenal 56% use

audio/videoconferencing. However, surprisingly, adoption of newer applications

such as converged communication clients (19%) is still modest at this time.

Nevertheless, it is evident that converged IP communications and these new

applications will help more and more organizations realize significant

productivity benefits with these innovative applications.

Mohit Rampal



vadmail@cybermedia.co.in


The author is country manager of 3Com India