Unified communications: Simple solutions for complex networking

The Choice

The concept of Unified Communications (UC) has blazed through the enterprise thanks to the appealing promise of enhanced network quality, efficiency and productivity. Even when a company factors in the beneficial costs to communications, the impact of the recession has left network managers wary around the globe.

Despite widespread apprehension of UC, the market still looks bright. According to a December 2009 global market report from Infonetics Research entitled ‘Unified Communication and IP Contact Center Market Share, Size and Forecasts’, “the UC markets are forecast to return to strong double-digit annual growth once the world’s economies recover, with sales surpassing $1 billion by 2012”.

Cementing the potential for localised growth is ‘The Unified Communications Market in SAME and Egypt’ Research from Frost & Sullivan (September 2009) which claims, “there has been a significant uptake of UC, especially in the Internet protocol (IP) telephony markets of the Middle East (SAME) and Egypt”.

However, when enterprises do decide to take the tentative steps towards converging voice, video and data onto a single network, various complexities can develop. Often data networking and telecommunications teams are thrown into unexpected partnerships. Barriers can instantly arise, ranging from inconsistent technical language to opposing working cultures and methodologies. This can cause application development to quickly fall by the wayside. On top of that, future application implementation could falter due to miscommunication between staff.

Alongside personnel issues, the technical knowledge needed for legacy network convergence can be troublesome to overcome. Therefore, before an IT department fully embraces UC, it is vital to consider whether it wants to undertake the challenging path to success.

Avoiding the Pitfalls

Once an organisation does choose to deploy a UC solution, further pitfalls may arise. It is easy to overlook the underlying limitations of corporate wide-area networks (WAN). Many CIOs take the short-term solution by quickly integrating each application onto the existing WAN. This quickly leads to over-complication and the network becomes crippled by widespread inefficiency.

What follows is the tendency to rollout additional equipment to overcome the poor performance of latency-intolerant real-time applications (such as voice and video). This not only proves costly, but also causes further difficulties. Thus, the key to achieving an efficient corporate network with converged services is to prioritise certain applications over others. This improves both the applications’ performance and the end-user experience.

This is especially true for voice and video UC applications. Their stringent latency, jitter and packet order requirements means ‘real-time’ applications require consistently high quality of service (QoS) levels across the entire network.

The stability of such applications is crucial for the enterprise as jitter or packet loss during a video conference could compromise business and lead to reduced usage or even complete abandonment of video conferencing. This would undeniably impact employee efficiency and performance.

There are plenty of precautions that can be taken to combat the above issues. Building an advanced UC network with a Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) backbone enables QoS capabilities that automatically allow prioritisation of one application over another. This is particularly important in early deployments of UC as one bad application experience can help create a negative attitude towards both applications and future UC deployments. Network managers must believe that UC can improve collaboration and performance, otherwise it will undermine confidence in the IT department.

The Rewards – UC Videoconferencing

Once the above complexities are avoided or overcome, enterprises will begin to reap the benefits. The growing pressure on enterprises to reduce their carbon footprint, combined with the growing costs of air travel and recent security issues, have led to increased use of videoconferencing (VC).

To date, communication via VC has remained for internal use within the company, but one of the growing demands for UC solutions is the ability to communicate securely through high-definition (HD) video with other companies. As VC becomes a growing part of UC, IT Managers should look to implement secure communications between companies.

An added incentive for CIOs to chase UC VC deployment is the possibility of implementing a secure extranet. Extending its use across a company yields a solid ROI on VC equipment - especially for companies that have existing HD or sophisticated telepresence solutions.

Another critical part of implementation is daily management. A consolidation of telecoms and networking teams can easily overload management practice. A network won’t ever be fully maintained unless it is possible to see both real time and historical reports.

A relatively easy and practical approach would be the deployment of a widespread WAN network management solution. Providing granular information on network and application performance (latency, jitter, packet drops, etc.), the tools to measure the above parameters help IT Managers to identify usage trends. Furthermore, CIOs can measure performance in real time allowing for quick discovery of network issues and a timely resolution of said issues.

However, many network management solutions often involve deploying software and/or hardware to capture this performance information. This approach can mean further trouble for IT managers. Getting another application to perform effectively across the network can intensify issues, potentially taxing the IT Manager’s attention and costing the network additional bandwidth.

The solution is for IT Managers to service-embed their WAN network management, thereby avoiding the time and expense of an additional application deployment in later implementations.

Put simply, enterprises need to plan ahead when considering the implementation of UC solutions. Careful preparation avoids personnel and network performance issues and helps create a scalable solution for the business to add new applications in the future.

The Long Run

As networking and telecommunication enterprises slowly combine to face the challenge of simplification, management of multiple messaging devices will rely on improved integration.

Finally, in an increasingly mobile and decentralized corporate environment, access for remote workers must not be overlooked when deploying UC. However tempting to shelve, it could prove detrimental to the company in the long run; slowing implementation and compromising the efficiency of UC.

IT Managers should first challenge the assumption that its corporate network can meet the future needs of full UC and then consider migrating to a purpose-built advanced IP MPLS network that can support UC applications. This would undeniably differentiate the organisation in an already competitive and volatile environment without having to suffer long-term business costs.