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CONVERGED NETWORK: Selecting Your Vendor

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CONVERGED

NETWORK: Selecting Your Vendor

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The white paper published by Lucent Technologies argues

the case of telecom vendors–why they are a better bet as supplier of

enterprise technologies in the converged era. You may agree or

disagree, but many points are worth a serious

consideration.

While Enterprise IT asset managers tend

to function mostly in real-time, meeting evolving needs and handling

crises, they also worry about how to get to where they need to be

tomorrow. Their jobs are to anticipate, meet, and (hopefully) exceed

business needs and objectives to the satisfaction of everyone–from

managers and internal end users to external customers, partners, and

suppliers.



And, they must do it all while

considering how competitive global issues and information technology

can leverage their positions. What these managers really need are

answers to four key performance/value questions on network computing

and broadband communications:





  • How can I, on behalf of our business,

    get the desired results in the best way possible while working

    within specific parameters for cost, reliability, security, grade

    and quality of service, bandwidth, etc.?

  • How can I be sure that the end results

    are compelling–i.e., that they satisfy or exceed the established

    outcome criteria?

  • How can I satisfy the needs of those

    who turn to me and my organization for IT support?

  • Who is the best vendor(s) to take our

    Infostructure to where it must be while insuring maximum asset

    performance, easy accommodation to dynamic changes, and minimal

    impact on budgets, staff, and end users?


The answers to these questions go to the

heart of why any enterprise buys IT. It is ultimately all about

people and work, and in this regard, IT must work to:





  • Please customers–internal and

    external.

  • Increase productivity by helping

    people manage their time better, and by shortening product and

    service development cycle times.Â

  • Increase revenues by speeding

    transaction times, easily expanding to accommodate higher

    transaction volumes, pleasing existing customers, and easing the

    processes for obtaining and retaining new customers.

  • Cut costs for the creation and

    delivery of products and services, the operation and maintenance

    of the Infostructure components, and potential expansion.

  • Solve unresolved business

    issues.

  • Create new, highly differentiated,

    profitable business opportunities.


The focus of IT has undergone a

not-so-subtle shift. Qualitative assessments such as performance,

ease of use, and value have superseded quantitative measures like

speed, power, and cost as the true drivers of technology deployment.

IT asset managers want to know as much about what an IT product will

do for them as about what it does. And technology for technology’s

sake has taken a deserved back seat to using technology to enable

business success as measured by the new metrics. In addition, it is

important to acknowledge that there is no one path or a single

“correct” timetable to the promised converged network of the future.

There are only options and issues that need to be constantly

evaluated in the light of changing internal and external

circumstances. And every organization will need to be transitioned

to this future a little differently.

Thus, every such manager wants to know :

Thus, every such manager wants to know

“Whom can I trust on this journey to the future?”

What these

managers want is a vendor who has:





  • A vision of the future that has

    credibility–not just a technology blueprint but also a clear view

    of the roles and responsibilities of customers and

    suppliers.

  • The intellectual and financial

    resources to work with customers to execute against agreed upon

    plans of action.

  • A willingness to respond quickly and

    effectively to changed circumstances.


In short, what they desire is a strategic

supplier who is willing to share the risks as well as the

rewards.



Those vendors who best address the four

performance/value questions are the ones who will be successful,

because they will be solving customers’ business problems–enhancing

systems and people performance to create profits and sustainable

competitive advantage. Although some vendors are getting close,

currently no single vendor has all of the pieces in place to provide

“solutions” in all of these areas or seamless inter-mediation

between the areas.



The ideal market-leading vendor of the

future will be a company with a highly integrated systems and

services organization. The differentiation will arise from how well

the integration is executed. And ultimately, this entity will

dominate because it will have succeeded in making technology so

transparent that what it does best is to simply be taken for

granted. The vendor’s people and systems expertise will bring out

the best in customers as they create the multi-services networking

environment of the future.



Technology and Market

Trends

Given the lightning speed, at which taskmasters are

creating new requirements for Enterprise IT asset managers, it is an
enormous challenge to figure out how to continuously get the most IT

bang for the buck as the world becomes increasingly

information-centric. (The fact that large IT deployments are

redirecting corporate assets away from other projects, creating

friction across enterprises as to the value that is supposedly being

created, only heightens pressures on CIOs.)



Today’s IT asset manager is continuously

striving to arrive at optimal solutions for the short-term

objectives of:





  • Lower costs of ownership

  • Lower costs of operation

  • Retaining higher values for previous

    investments

  • Smoothing the way for cost effective

    migration to next-generation requirements

  • Enhancing asset performance while

    investing in fewer employees

  • Creating a networking environment that

    is always available, always working at peak efficiency, and

    totally secure.

  • Dealing with IT suppliers who are

    reliable and accountable.


Flattening networks to make them more

responsive, reliable, and easy to manage speaks directly to people

issues and, ultimately, bottomline concerns. Taking advantage of the

move toward packet communications to save money on voice traffic

through tariff  arbitrage significantly cuts costs in the short

term. It also positions networks to leverage the coming era of

Internet Protocol-based (IP-based) enterprise and public network

services and applications, and the evolution toward all-optical

networks.

giving end users personalized/customized access ...

In other words, giving end users

personalized/customized access to synchronized information,

anywhere, anytime, is not just cost-effective networking but also

good business–today.



You Can’t Stop the Clock

It is

no secret that what is driving convergence and the explosion in
global network traffic is data communications and the concomitant

needs to cut networking costs while increasing reliability,

availability, and security. Estimates are that the average

Enterprise can expect 60 percent per annum increases in xNet usage,

and 30 percent per annum increases in server-to-server traffic as

browsers dominate the desktop and commerce adopts a Web-centric

model.



The nature of this traffic is also

changing as bandwidth-intensive client/server applications

proliferate, and as online commerce and user demands for richer

content and context for their messaging applications take

off.



In other words, we are living through a

historically unprecedented traffic explosion–and everyone is rushing

to deal with it. This said, there is no denying the two fundamental

realities of data networks today: They cost a tremendous amount of

money to own, manage, and grow, and they are increasingly complex.

In addition, voice traffic is increasingly totally digital and

growing at more than 10 percent a year on a separate and equally, if

not more, costly network. This is why service cost mitigation

without service degradation is at the top of most Enterprise

Infostructure managers’ lists.



One approach is to physically

aggregate/converge traffic from as close to the desktop as possible

onto a single network that provides the highest quality of service

for applications with very different transport characteristics. Case

studies of early adapters have shown that leveraging the benefits of

superior network resource utilization from this type of scenario

results in meaningful savings. These are on top of the savings that

can result from moving voice traffic onto an IP- or other

packet-based data network (ATM, Frame Relay, etc.), so that voice in

essence “rides for free.”



Voice over packet networks....

Voice over packet networks, specifically

Voice-over-IP (VoIP), will likely result in a revolution in service

pricing. Driven by the cost savings justification, it will also

result in the pervasive deployment of the Infostructure for

next-generation services and applications–making the networks

future-ready. Despite appearances, this is not a technology

revolution, because compressed voice over packet networks has been

switched and routed over private lines for years. The real issue has

been that putting voice over Frame Relay and IP networks raised

quality concerns. It was not until the year that VoIP matured to the

point of being close to commercial grade for phone-to-phone

conversations, and most latency issues have been resolved. While

VoIP has been slow to take off, by some estimates, fax over IP

already accounts for 30 percent of all international inter-corporate

fax traffic. The figures for intra-corporate fax traffic are

undoubtedly higher. The development of real-time fax capabilities to

make the IP experience an exact replica of the PSTN may soon make IP

transport the dominant mode of inter-country faxing because of the

tariff arbitrage cost savings. This is further driving the

desirability of enabling voice to “ride for free” on these existing

networks.



The case for going straight to an

enterprise-wide IP network–IP from the desktop, switched/routed

through the LAN and out over the WAN–looks attractive. Nevertheless,

the issues that IT asset managers must deal with are not just about

saving money or technological elegance, they are about optimizing IT

resources and personalizing them to perform the tasks at hand and

add value rather than drain dollars from the enterprise.



Enterprise Convergence: The Case for

Migration

From an architectural perspective, the goal is to

create from the parallel voice and data networks of today a network
that is future-ready (easily upgradeable), cost-effective, secure,

always on, always available, ubiquitously accessible, technology

transparent, and user friendly. This is because in an

information-centric world, giving end users the ability to leverage

the network assets and its functional capabilities and flexibility

is the only way to please customers, create profits, and derive

sustainable competitive advantage. One way of looking at today’s

world of parallel voice and data networks is from Lucent

Technologies functional layer approach. Despite the unique

characteristics of each, voice and data networking start life with

similar architectures. They both have:



They both have:They both have:

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  • A device layer where the devices have

    specifically engineered capabilities for connection to physical,

    special-purpose access networks.

  • Physical access networks that have

    been optimized for the transport, switching, and routing of

    specific information types–circuit switched for voice and

    low-speed data (modem-based fax and e-mail), and packet for data

    and, increasingly, voice.Â

  • Portfolios of “services” –that is,

    features such as queuing, transfer, and conference

  • Applications such as call centres,

    collaboration, etc. 


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Convergence under this view is the coming

together of these architectures at each layer, to reduce costs and

enable new applications, resulting in new ways of doing business.

The convergence architecture needs to be engineered so that any of

today’s networks can be migrated to deliver information-enabled

business applications on any media over any network–a key to

answering the four value/performance questions raised

earlier.



What the end user wants is easy and

transparent access to the capabilities that make him/her most

productive, irrespective of the device used and network(s)

traversed. The Enterprise Infostructure manager’s task is to make

this happen in the best way possible–giving end users what they

need, when they need it, how they need it, in an environment where

price/performance is optimized and security and privacy of

transactions are sacrosanct. 

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Consider Your Telecom

Vendor

Two questions lie at the heart of the “whom can I

trust” challenge facing IT buyers:



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  • Are there options available to

    leverage the migration from predominantly either a voice

    infrastructure or a data infrastructure investment

    perspective?

  • Will disturbing the legacy environment

    in one of the layers cause major problems in other layers?



Lucent Technologies addresses the first

question in two ways. The first is through its expanding portfolio

of data networking products and services as offered by Lucent Data

Networking Systems (DNS). Solutions from this organization are

geared toward those 

customers who have decided that

leveraging their legacy data communications systems and/or starting
from scratch with a new data-centric architecture is the best way to

move forward. The second is through the product and service offers

articulated by Lucent Business Communications Systems (BCS) for

customers who, while moving forward with their data networks, wish

to also bring their legacy voice networking environment up to

future-ready status–transferring the best of that voice world to the

data world.

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The decision about the migration and

upgrading of inter-connected boxes is an individual organization’s

decision. However, that decision needs to be made in the context of

the answer to the second question, which brings in the competencies

of any vendor to offer integrated systems and services support no

matter what path is chosen. 

Thus, a vendor’s “vision” story

Thus, a vendor’s “vision” story is not

complete without detailed explanations behind all the costs of

migration and all the responsibilities of the parties involved to

execute against a plan, including the crucial professional services

and support.



Because of where they are coming from,

PBX vendors are very sensitive to migration issues, having lived

through the rigours of moving from analog to digital, as well as

reliability and retained value challenges. Integration and service

support are second nature because the expectations in the voice

world have always been set extraordinarily high: Every voice call is

mission critical. Every voice call is expected to receive dial tone

and be connected to the address it called in real time. Every voice

call must be delivered to its destination. The capabilities of a

chosen vendor to explain what they are going to do about phasing in

their migration strategy, and how this will affect the performance

and cost of the network and its elements during the transition, are

tantamount. Competitive differentiation of vendors is going to be

based more on how they execute against their claims as integrated

systems and services companies, as opposed to whether they are

making the box du jour.



So, Whom Can I Trust?

Given the

extraordinary pace of technological change, and the disparate needs
of Enterprise Infostructure managers, there is no right answer about

the best way to get from here to there. The only thing that can be

stated with some clarity right now is that based on the users’ needs

for interoperability (e.g., utilizing standards), the broad vision

of the future is at least coming into focus.



It is also apparent that making legacy

network elements future-aware, if not totally future-ready, is

critically important because cycle times are increasing. As

enterprises increase their dependency on IT to help drive them in

the market, capabilities must be put in place for fast yet

non-disruptive moves toward converged communications, both

internally and externally. For the Infostructure manager, the

objective is to deliver the desired functionality, not technology,

to the enterprise’s various communications constituencies when they

need it, how they need it, in a secure fashion and at reasonable

costs for the highest level of performance.



What stands out is that despite the rush

to judgement to declare the PBX and supporting TDM infrastructure

yesterday’s news, smart Enterprise Infostructure managers might want

to put their preconceived ideas aside. For example, PBXs (which

several years ago morphed themselves into Enterprise Communications

Servers that sit as peers on corporate LANs and deliver real-time

distributed transactions on a large scale with virtual 100 percent

availability and reliability) are far from dead. With 85 percent of

all network failures diagnosed and fixed in real-time without the

end user ever knowing that there was a problem, the expertise of the

PBX vendors in doing the entire gamut of network management

functions—including network design, implementation and operation,

and systems integration—is the reason why some of the data

communications industry’s largest networks are managed and

maintained by PBX vendor services centres. Ultimately,

infrastructure/IT asset managers must be really good

listeners.



They listen to the needs of their various

constituencies—end users, corporate customers, suppliers and

strategic allies. They need to listen to their networks to determine

whether they are optimized to meet existing and emerging needs based

on the four value/performance questions. And finally, they need to

listen to their vendors.

Extracts from a Lucent Technologies

white paper by Peter A Bernstein, president, Infonautics

Consulting, Inc.

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