CONVERGED NETWORK: Selecting Your Vendor

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. 
• 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 “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 tariffÂ
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.

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, 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:

• 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. 
• Portfolios of “services” –that is, features such as queuing, transfer, and conference
• Applications such as call centres, collaboration, etc. 

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. 

Consider Your Telecom Vendor

Two questions lie at the heart of the “whom can I trust” challenge facing IT buyers:

• 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.

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 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.