A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies

This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by VoiceCon Orlando 2008:

Just added: John Chambers, Chairman and CEO, Cisco Systems, has joined the VoiceCon Orlando keynote lineup. That’s another huge reason for you to register, and you can still save up to $200 person on a team discount. Register today.
And as a VoiceCon UC eWeekly subscriber, you can get an exhibition-only pass free (a $50 value). Simply use Priority Code MLYTVC14 when you register
For complete conference details, visit www.voicecon.com/orlando/

The conventional wisdom of just a few weeks ago was that Romney would be the Republican candidate, and that he would square off against Hillary in the general election. But, at least for these two presidential wanna-be’s, reality bites: Today, Romney’s out and Hillary appears to be on the ropes. Ahh, the best laid plans….

As we get ready for VoiceCon Orlando, I can’t help but wonder if UC is about to enter a similar period of trial and travail. To be sure, UC has considerable wind at its back: Companies are rolling out elements of Unified Communications and some have had enough experience to document meaningful benefits—cost savings, process improvement, improved productivity and customer satisfaction.

And things are likely to get better as more fully-baked UC offerings emerge, as UC pricing becomes more rational and simplified and as vendors team up to provide more comprehensive and interoperable solutions—see recent postings by Brent Kelly, Marty Parker, Eric Krapf and others on NoJitter.com. In short, there’s ample reason for optimism.

That said, UC won’t have a smooth, quick ride to market acceptance. At VoiceCon Orlando I expect that the obstacles will be explored both in conference sessions and on the exhibit floor.

Take, for example, the conventional wisdom that UC implementations will grow as more and more IP Telephony (IPT) platforms are deployed. That makes sense, but I’ve been hearing rumblings that problems that weren’t apparent when IPT traffic was confined within tightly managed private networks are starting to appear as mobile and remote workers send traffic over the PSTN and public Internet. When that happens, not surprisingly, the quality of communications degrades.

John Bartlett, VP at NetForecast, focuses much of his time on network design and performance issues, and he will be leading several VoiceCon sessions on these topics. In recent correspondence with me, he identified the following four execution issues that arise as enterprises move from piloting/limited rollouts of IPT to full deployment:

• Not getting QoS right everywhere—ongoing changes to router configurations can cause settings to get changed, and there aren’t good tools to check and recheck configurations for QoS to make sure they are right.
• Mixing different types of endpoint and infrastructure equipment can result in encodings becoming inconsistent (G.711, G.729, G.722).
• Multiple coding and decoding, or recoding occurring along the path (VOIP to PSTN back to VOIP).
• Broken application-layer devices along the path—there aren’t good tools to detect this problem, nor any consistent methodology to find and isolate the problems.

John’s list highlights how vulnerable IPT traffic can be and it reminds us that despite the growing deployments, IP Telephony is still maturing. To the extent that UC depends on stable IPT performance, it’s on a somewhat unstable foundation.

And, as my colleagues and I have discussed in past issues of this newsletter, there are challenges facing UC quite apart from the evolution of IPT. There’s no lack of interest from customers in UC, but the combination of interoperability issues, the ROI hurdle and the still fragmented set of offerings, even from a single vendor, has limited the number of UC shipments going into U.S. enterprises.

All of these topics will be on center stage at VoiceCon Orlando. There’ll be enterprise executives who have committed their organizations to a UC future, and there’ll be vendors and technical experts debating the merits of various UC architectures and approaches. And, hopefully, you’ll be there to ask the questions that are on your mind. In the meantime, I invite you to share your thoughts about UC’s progress either here in our forum or via email at fknight@cmp.com

Fred Knight
GM/Co-Chair, VoiceCon
Publisher, NoJitter.com

Posted in Usability, Implementation, Equipment, Fred Knight, Unified Communications |

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