IP telephony provide organizations with the opportunity to use new technology to reduce the cost of running their communications systems. But actually realizing the savings requires careful planning and ongoing monitoring, management and troubleshooting. Robin Gareiss of Nemertes Research will describe the structure of operational costs in hybrid and all-IP deployments and the financial impact of using automated management systems. She will be joined by Dr. Fiona Lodge of webinar sponsor Prognosis.
Register Now!
If you’re in a conference session, and an Ethernet switch vendor tells you to use 10/100 instead of Gigabit wherever you can, you must be in a session on Green IT.
In this instance, it was an Interop session on “Deploying a Green IP Telephony Network,” and the speaker was Harpreet Chadha, senior director, product management at Extreme Networks. And besides the idea of curtailing (or at least not expanding) bandwidth, Harpreet suggested selectively powering down at least a portion of the IP phones in a given office when they’re not in use. He sketched out a scenario for a 200-person office that operates 9–5, Monday through Friday:
Identify 150 non-critical desk phones
Power down at 6 PM each evening, restart at 7 AM the next morning
Power down over the weekend
The obvious result is that the company saves 75% on the cost of powering those phones during the down hours, and the more power-hungry the phones, the more the savings. Harpreet noted that the phones can be brought up sequentially over a period of time, so as to avoid overwhelming the DHCP server with a flood of registrations as they re-boot at 7 AM. However, in response to audience questions, he agreed that there does need to be a mechanism developed to override or otherwise deal with the fact that having the phones down could be a problem in a 911 situation for employees who are present after hours.
Another point of debate came up in response to the panel’s APC representative, Domenic Alcaro, who’d cited the statistic that datacenters consumed 60 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2006, at a cost of $4.5 billion; and that this consumption represented about 1.5% of the U.S.’s total electricity use.
The question was, essentially: So if our industry cuts its power consumption, say, by one-third, we’ve only taken 0.5% out of the nation’s power usage—is it worth it?
Well, besides saving the industry a billion and a half dollars, it’d take about 20.3 million tons of CO2 out of the environment. Simon Gwatkin of Mitel, in his presentation for the Interop panel, noted that the average household creates 5.5 tons of CO2 per year, so you’re eliminating the equivalent of 3.7 million households’ worth of pollution if you cut datacenter power usage by one-third.
Obviously, one industry isn’t going to solve the problem, but everyone can make a contribution, and when it comes to IT, we can be part of the solution beyond just cutting our own power consumption. I was talking with Fred Knight about an Interop session he attended in which a power company representative described the various economic incentives that the power generators themselves have to use technology in order to more closely monitor residential power consumption, and adjust dynamically.
It seems as if this is where the “smart home” movement should really be going. It’s not about the house playing your favorite music as soon as it senses you walking into the room—although in Vegas I also talked to Agito Networks about how they use location-tracking technology to force cellular-WiFi handoffs, so the technology is really a lot closer than you might think.
Instead, it’s about being able to schedule things like dishwashers to run in the middle of the night, during off-peak times, so that the power company doesn’t have to fall back on incredibly polluting energy sources to meet peak demand.
If we think differently about energy, we can use less of it and can deploy information technology to use it more wisely and efficiently. It should work….
What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com
Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair
This issue of VoiceCon Enews is sponsored by VoiceCon Webinars:
Free VoiceCon Webinar: “Controlling OPEX in Enterprise Communications”
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
11:00 am PT/2:00 pm ET
IP telephony provide organizations with the opportunity to use new technology to reduce the cost of running their communications systems. But actually realizing the savings requires careful planning and ongoing monitoring, management and troubleshooting. Robin Gareiss of Nemertes Research will describe the structure of operational costs in hybrid and all-IP deployments and the financial impact of using automated management systems. She will be joined by Dr. Fiona Lodge of webinar sponsor Prognosis.
Register Now!
Gartner has a new report out (press release) in which they surveyed 300 organizations and reached the conclusion that Unified Communications’ value is in increasing “business agility,” rather than in saving money. That was based on actual experiences of early adopters.
The disconnect came when Gartner checked on expectations of those who hadn’t yet deployed UC. “By contrast, lower total cost of ownership and lower equipment costs were the top two expectations of UC among companies that have yet to deploy it,” the company reported. The release went on to quote Gartner research VP Steve Blood as saying, “It is evident that there is a significant difference between the expectations of UC and its actual benefits. We recommend that organizations build a business case based on enabling mobility and agility rather than on reducing IT department costs.”
That jibes with what the UCStrategies.com folks say: The big money is in time to market, time to sales, improved business processes in whatever form it takes. Hardly anybody seems to be buying the time-savings-equals-money-savings argument any more.
So we seem to have the classic “aspirational/perspirational” divide, to borrow a term from Chris Thompson of Cisco. And the question is, during a recession, will an enterprise allow itself the aspirational spending for improved business processes, or will it grab for that low-hanging fruit in the form of maintenance/service/support costs, conferencing and international toll savings, that basic IP-telephony offers?
The latter option so often tends to get positioned as a kind of failure—a failure of imagination, or will, or ambition. But there’s no reason that “aspirational” spending shouldn’t be a harder sell in bad economic times, especially when the “perspirational” deployments will not only save money now, but can lay the groundwork for the aspirational gains in the near- to mid-term future.
Another critical part of achieving those gains, however, is organizational issues. I addressed this in a blog post at No Jitter last week, and Gartner highlights it as well. In fact, the market research firm goes as far as to say that, “more than 80 per cent of appropriate organizational changes, including procedures, policies and compensation, will lag behind technological change through 2011. For example, many IT departments will continue to be organized separately around voice, networking and mobility, and some may not even have control of mobile budget.” Adds Steve Blood: “Nowhere is the effect of this organizational lag more apparent than in how the convergence of voice, data and applications is affecting organizations.”
A lot of things are going to slow down the effective deployment of Unified Communications. One is the purchasing environment and the business case issues. This organizational challenge is another one. Not surprisingly, this was the case with basic IP telephony infrastructure as well. We’re hearing some indications that enterprises are engaging on the organizational issues of UC, but the challenge is even more complex than the basic voice-data bifurcation that had to be dealt with a couple of years ago, when voice over IP first emerged.
So enterprises should begin to explore Unified Communications now, even if they don’t intend to buy right away. Such engagement is critical if enterprise IT departments are to understand their own members’ roles in deploying and managing the technology whenever we do end up making the transition from perspiration to aspiration.
What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com
Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair
This issue of VoiceCon Enews is sponsored by BCR Training:
BCR Training in Information Technologies—Essential Training
Get vendor-neutral education in technologies essential to your career Public classes in a city near you:
Planning and Implementing VOIP Unified Communications
Introduction to Telecom: Voice, Data and Video
Convergence I: Understanding Data and IP Networks
Convergence II: Preparing for CompTIA Convergence+ Certification
Voice over IP and IP Telephony
VOIP II: Deploying and Best Practices in the Enterprise
SIP Essentials
Plus more than 30 programs that can be brought to your site. Learn more: www.bcrtraining.com
Next week, I’m going to a show called Interop. You’ve probably heard of it; it’s the big show in Vegas that doesn’t feature Celine Dion, Elton John or water. I chair the VOIP and UC tracks for Interop, and we’ve got some interesting stuff coming up that I’ll be blogging about at No Jitter.
Last fall, at the New York Interop, our outfit did a sub-conference called VoiceCon At Interop, but lately I’ve been wondering if we shouldn’t do something for the event we produce, on the order of Interop At Voicecon.
Obviously, I’m not talking about transplanting the Interop show into VoiceCon, but old-timers remember that Interop was originally a show about just what its name suggested: Interoperability. In the broader networking world, interoperability is no longer the hottest issue going; but in the IP-telephony/Unified Communications world, interoperability is suddenly all the rage.
The buzz began at VoiceCon Orlando last month, when Microsoft and IBM representatives shook hands and agreed to test interoperability between OCS and Sametime. We also found that attendee evaluations called out interoperability as a key issue that folks want to see more programming on.
So I’ve decided to start exploring this issue more deeply by writing an extensive, in-depth feature for No Jitter. I’m hoping to complete the interviews soon and post the feature early next month, but the first challenge has been to define just what we’re talking about when it comes to interoperability. What has to interoperate with what?
Marty Parker of Unicomm Consulting and UCStrategies.com gave me a great list as we prepared for a webinar on interoperability that AVST is sponsoring this week. Here are the areas of an IPT/UC implementation where Marty says interoperability is a critical issue that needs to be resolved:
Number plans
SIP and QSIG and PRI
Federation
Networking diverse PBXs
Networking diverse voice mail
Unified Messaging
User Interfaces and Client
Mobility voice and data channels
Communications Management and Reporting tools
I also did an interview last week with Mun Yuen Leong, who’s CTO at Avaya, during which Mun Yuen broke the interoperability challenge down into three layers:
The infrastructure layer, where SIP is the key standard;
The presence federation layer, where SIP/SIMPLE and XMPP are the standards;
The application layer, where it’s SOA and Web Services standards.
You can (and I expect I will) get down into the weeds of the interoperability standards, but I think the bigger question is what’s at stake at each of Mun Yuen’s layers, or each of Marty’s focal areas. And the question is best posed in the negative: What will happen if we don’t have interoperability at the infrastructure, presence federation or application layers? What will be lost if diverse Unified Messaging systems can’t exchange messages among themselves, or with certain other types of communications platforms?
Pretty clearly, lack of interoperability is where we’re at right now, pretty much across the board. (Note that lack of interoperability doesn’t necessarily mean lack of standards.) What we need to understand is what is going to change about the communications world that would make vendors decide to be open instead of being closed. What that comes down to, ultimately, is whether a critical mass of vendors see it as being in their economic interest to be open instead of being closed (or being open in name only).
What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com
Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair
This issue of VoiceCon Enews is sponsored by BCR Training:
BCR Training in Information Technologies—Essential Training
Get vendor-neutral education in technologies essential to your career Public classes in a city near you:
Planning and Implementing VOIP Unified Communications
Introduction to Telecom: Voice, Data and Video
Convergence I: Understanding Data and IP Networks
Convergence II: Preparing for CompTIA Convergence+ Certification
Voice over IP and IP Telephony
VOIP II: Deploying and Best Practices in the Enterprise
SIP Essentials
Plus more than 30 programs that can be brought to your site. www.bcrtraining.com
Telecom used to be part of the facilities department. Is it time to put it back there?
That might be a little bit of an exaggeration. Maybe it’s more accurate to say, You can take Telecom out of Facilities, but you can’t take Facilities out of Telecom.
We’ve recently had a lot of great posts on our No Jitter editorial website discussing various aspects of convergence at Layer 1, from energy costs to cabling (see, for example, Matt Brunk here, and Gary Audin here). The common thing they note is that the true commodities—not bits and bytes, but the things that push the bits and bytes out of the boxes and get them to their destination—those commodities are getting more expensive, with no reason to expect a reversal of the trend. So how do you build into your planning a way to use less of them?
For energy (leave aside the social/green aspect, focus on cost), Matt has written about the need for Energy Star standards, like you have for household appliances, for servers and other power-sucking IT gear. And Gary’s post cited above discusses protocols for using energy more efficiently in IP phones. Gary has also written about using power costs as a factor in deciding where to site primary and backup datacenters.
Now, that won’t always play out ideally. The folks I wrote about last week, the hosting company PosTrack, had to balance the desire to locate where power is cheaper (Joliet, IL, in the exurbs), vs. needing to locate where they could efficiently make high-bandwidth connections to the big fiber backbone they needed to access; this second requirement landed some of their gear in a cage at a Level 3 datacenter high above downtown Chicago, where costs are high.
The issue of site surveying and selection even gets down to the local level; as Matt writes in his post on the “Copper Storm,” you may even want to look at configuring your wiring plan and placing closets and IDFs/MDFs in ways that let you use the least amount of expensive copper.
The other solution that Matt addresses is wireless. With the 802.11n standard promising 100+ Mbps bandwidth, this could theoretically be a solution. And you’d think that, even if you weren’t comfortable going completely wireless, you might at least consider not cabling certain parts of new facilities, or not upgrading cabling where you otherwise might, especially if you can arrange to have your more mobile workers or office hotelers located in this area. On the other hand, deciding not to cable is a pretty long-term decision, so you’d really want to make sure you’re right before you go with it (or go without it, I guess).
Though I wasn’t serious at the beginning about putting Telecom back under Facilities, the connection still needs to be made. If you can figure out a way to save facilities costs by the way you configure a deployment, it’d be nice if you could capture that savings for your own budget, and use the funds to pilot higher-layer technologies. However, this would require the financial managers to forgo the short-term facilities savings for the promise of bigger productivity or competitive gains driven by stuff like unified communications. They’d have to buy the idea that UC is worth the cost of deploying.
For that matter, so would you.
What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com
Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair
This issue of VoiceCon Enews is sponsored by Mitel:
Mitel delivers flexibility and simplicity in smart unified communications solutions and applications for organizations of all sizes. Combined with a full range of managed services that include voice and data network design and traffic provisioning, custom application development, and attractive financing options, Mitel is reinventing how successful organizations gain competitive advantage by easily collaborating and communicating over distance and time with customers, colleagues and partners.
One of the trends we started noticing almost as soon as IP-PBXs reached a reasonable level of maturity was the tendency of colleges and universities to ditch their telco Centrex systems in favor of the new CPE, usually motivated by impressive cost savings. The down side for the university IT/telecom departments was that they could no longer resell the service to students as a profit center.
I had a chance last week to visit with a company here in the Chicago area that’s trying to reverse that trend. PosTrack is a Joliet, IL-based company that was founded more than 20 years ago by Don Heidrich, who still serves as the company’s CEO. Don started the company as a software vendor making point-of-sales systems, and has expanded over the years into a variety of other application development areas, and most recently (about 5 years ago) got into the hosted services business; they’ve gained Enhanced Information Provider regulatory status (similar to CLEC status) and now provide hosted service to K-12 districts and higher education institutions in 37 states.
The company’s partners at Siemens wanted to show off PosTrack’s latest implementation, a Siemens HiPath 8000 (or OpenScape Voice, as the product is now called) that resides in a cage that PosTrack rents out inside Level 3’s datacenter in downtown Chicago. PosTrack’s main operation in Joliet runs the company’s legacy HiPath 4000, which eventually will migrate to an 8000 platform, but having the space in Chicago provides physically redundant operations, to bolster PosTrack’s hosting credentials. It also lets PosTrack use 1 Gbps fiber to hook directly into the massive Level 3 backbone, again in redundant spots at Level 3 facilities in 2 Chicago locations. “We’re all about the survivability,” remarked Tony Brncich, a PosTrack VP who joined Don Heidrich on our datacenter tour.
PosTrack offers 5 main hosted services:
SIP trunking—They’re one of the good guys in this respect; Tony Brncich observed that the large carriers, who have been dragging their feet on full SIP trunk availability, “don’t like us” on this score.
Unified messaging—The PosTrack guys said this has been especially appealing for K-12, because it lets teachers have more up-to-date dial-in messaging capabilities, without having to do a lot of retrofitting to facilities in older school buildings in order to implement converged CPE.
Unified Plus—A variant of the previous offering that adds outbound dialing, an important application for schools that may have to notify parents of closings, etc., as well as for universities looking to build more effective emergency-notification systems.
Hosted IP-telephony—This is the full hosted OpenScape Voice platform.
Mobility—This is the one that Don Heidrich thinks is going to become really big. It’s targeted at colleges and universities, and provides a dual-mode cellular/WiFi smartphone, which works internally on the Wi-Fi when the students are on campus. Besides the potential savings to students on their cellular costs—both voice and text/Internet–the service provides multiple channels for the aforementioned emergency notifications. And in these emergency scenarios, it offers a better option for students to call out to loved ones and classmates. Tony Brncich noted that in the recent shooting at nearby Northern Illinois University, “The weak link there was the cellular network,” which quickly maxed out its capacity and blocked outbound calls to and from worried students and parents. Having a VoWiFi-to-Internet outbound calling capability avoids this. That’s particularly useful because many large universities are located in secondary market, where cellular coverage is especially thin, Don Heidrich noted.
PosTrack’s hosted service also potentially gets the university back in business as a telecom reseller. Tony Brncich said PosTrack sells the mobility service to the university for $40-$50 per student, and the university charges the students whatever it sees fit. Given students’ devotion to wireless and near-indifference to landline, this kind of service could have potential. If your university IT department is interested in getting back into the business of being a telecom provider, that is.
What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com
Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair
