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Two events which have had the largest impact on business this century are the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and corporate scandals/bankruptcies of Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Adelphia, et al. These two events ushered in sweeping changes in disaster preparedness and corporate governance. Often preparedness plus regulatory/legislative/presidential orders are linked and managed under an umbrella term of ?¢‚Ǩ?ìcompliance" and ?¢‚Ǩ?ìbusiness continuity". Most if not all public concerns have a compliance officer who is tasked with planning, budgeting and implementing business continuity. Depending on the size of the firm, a compliance budget can be huge, measured in the tens of millions of dollars or more. In the networking industry business continuity is being addressed as network architecture attributes.

One of the first projects I did as a young engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid 1980s was to design and implement a 400-mile private fiber optic network. This was unheard of at the time; a company building its own fiber optic network. But the ROI was strong with savings of 10s of millions of dollars and unlimited bandwidth available between 90 buildings. After the project was completed my manager´s boss was concerned about an outage or disaster hitting, which would wipe out communications for an unknown about of time. I was tasked with a vulnerability identification and disaster plan. I analyzed all the fiber routes and identified single points of failure. The topology was a distributed star with approximately 30 buildings being homed to three major sites. To avoid loosing communications to one of these major sites I proposed a back up microwave system, redundant fiber and equipment, special contract clauses and cost with contractors to increase fiber restoration priority for Digital, and changing the physical topology from star to ring to assure two paths to every building. In the end, the topology was changed to a ring, a new contractor contract was signed and spare equipment and fiber was housed on Digital property. The business continuity plan cost the project a few million dollars but was justified on the cost of lost business and productivity to Digital.

Today network architects can leverage key attributes associated with their corporate networks to deliver business continuity without incurring huge cost as I had to back in the 1980s. I identify a few of these network attributes here.

Mobility

Mobility is being added to corporate networks. Smartphones and PDAs offer access to e-mail and voice communications independent of a physical building. As explored in Lippis Report Issue 72, the mobile industry is quickly moving to connect mobile end-points to enterprise IT services such as IP telephony features and functions, calendar synchronization, presence, data bases, etc. The barriers for mobile devices to access enterprise data will be eliminated. In addition to smartphones and PDAs, WLANs offer mobility to laptop and desktop users. Most important is the fact that network administrators can deploy a WLAN solution quickly, offering network access to knowledge workers in short order, assuming that internet access is available. In short, the combination of mobile service providers and WLANs offer network architects redundant network access to corporate infrastructure. In addition WLANs can be constructed quickly for operations located in an alternative facility.

IP Telephony

One of the key network attributes of IP telephony is that it´s based on IP. That is, end-point addresses are assigned by a DHCP server eliminating the time and cost associated with moves, adds and changes. So, IP telephony users can plug their soft or hard IP phone into a network jack and be presented with connectivity, which includes their preferences and settings. No operator needs to be available. This was a key network attribute for many in the financial services industry in NY during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. These firms were able to bring their network and communications operations back on-line one day after the attacks thanks to IP telephony´s mobility features.

Network Access Control

Stratifying, segmenting and controlling user access to conform to regulatory compliance requirements is a business continuity requirement. Controlling guest, contractor and user access to network segments, applications, data, work product and services with visibility into a user´s behavior and use of IT resources provides a level of flexibility network and IT departments have not had in LAN systems. Network Access Control or NAC solutions are helping compliance managers meet regulatory requirements. To comply with various regulations, organizations need a means to segment users so that only authorized users can access sensitive data and demonstrate compliance to auditors. For example, some organizations need to restrict access to credit card data to comply with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standard. Hospitals and medical facilities must protect patient records to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Enterprises need the ability to restrict access to critical information based on a user´s role. In addition, to prove they have effective controls in place, organizations need a means to audit data and application usage and to document that access is indeed restricted. A NAC solution will protect sensitive data, limit the scope of an audit to a subset of user and server systems subject to the regulation and provide reports and views, which are friendly to auditors.

NACs are being funded with compliance budgets if they provide the following key services: policy-based access controls which track all user activity and traffic flows on the network; application access control at layer 7 limits whose applications a user can run on the network; documented polices that allow IT to document what control policies are in place and to whom they apply. This is a key auditing tool for demonstrating that users excluded by a policy cannot reach sensitive data. Further controls include activity reports for both users and application/services; user reports including every application, server, and resource a user touched in a given timeframe; application/service reports providing details about all users who ran a particular application or accessed a particular resource during a given period.

Network Management

Network management systems have taken on a new role beyond element management to compliance management. Compliance auditors have influence and when they tell a Board of Directors (BoD) to audit the network for compliance, the network needs to be audited. Network management systems are enforcing regulatory requirements and demonstrating compliance. For example, when configuring network change orders on a router, the approval process needs to be documented. If a router configuration change is made a corporation needs to show who did it and when.

CIOs are getting pressure from their BoD to audit their networks. If a node in the network goes down, is the network still in compliance? Does a configuration change bring the network out of compliance? Whom do you trust to do the configuration changes knowing that they have to be documented and journaled? If you have an encrypted link and a node goes down are you still encrypted?

A centralized change entitlement system can control configuration changes and provide tools to produce reports and compliance validation. New rules such as HIPAA, encryption, safety of information, encrypted medical data at point of access, etc., are required by most today. These regulatory requirements can be configured and its changes tracked at the physical layer of the network and network management can now support regulation auditors with reports in a form they understand. Some network management systems such as Cisco Works include templates for customers to configure compliance tracking for requirement such as HIPAA, PCI, etc.

WAN Bandwidth

Some of my high-end clients are able to cost justify gigabit links across the country and into Europe. Gigabit Ethernet over the wide area fundamentally changes corporate asset placement decisions as LAN-like performance is now available over the WAN. This means that shadow data centers can be placed on different continents. Business continuity can be assured for data centers and major IT resources as single geographic points of failure/disaster can be eliminated. Also placement of employees can be reviewed and analyzed too; as application performance becomes independent of geography, so too can employees.

Other important network architecture attributes are broadband access to home and remote offices, IP addressing and the role of highly available DHCP servers and Communications-Enabled Business Process. We´ll get to these topics in future Lippis Reports.

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By QUINTUM TECHNOLOGIES

As IP telephony rollouts continue, a new set of challenges has emerged. In particular, businesses are encountering a variety of unanticipated problems as they deploy VoIP to remote locations including: local survivability, analog support, PSTN connectivity and remote management. This white paper outlines remote office challenges and solutions. By keeping these concepts in mind as they plan their VoIP deployments, corporate IT departments and service providers alike can avoid the pitfalls experienced during remote office VoIP implementations.

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Produced by Dialogic Communications Corporation (DCC), the leading provider of emergency notification technology

Experts at the World Health Organization (WHO) believe that the world is closer to another influenza pandemic than at any time since 1968, when the last of the previous century´s three pandemics occurred. Consequently, President Bush requested to fund the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza. The National Strategy guides our preparedness and response to influenza pandemic. Three areas, as identified by the Federal government, are pillars of this plan: Preparedness and Communication, Surveillance and Detection, and Response and Containment.

This white paper will focus on the first pillar of the National Strategy, Preparedness and Communication, offering comprehensive strategies that involve the use of emergency notification technology. Each is consistent with recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Response Plan (NRP) and the National Incident Management System (NIMS). Contingency planners inside both the public and private sectors will find the contents to be relevant and beneficial to their respective organizations.

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by Consistacom

The flattened call center architecture advanced by Avaya in the last few years has proven its worth in the most demanding environments. It has reduced costs, made worldwide virtual call centers possible, and introduced significant new disaster recovery capabilities. Lessons learned in leading edge installations have been combined with new application capabilities to introduce Multi-System Synchronizer, the first enterprise scale management tool for the flattened architecture. This paper discusses how synchronization delivers increased resiliency for dealing with disasters, improves the quality and consistency of a caller´s experience, and lowers the total cost of ownership of the call center.

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Mobile wireless technologies are enhancing personal and professional lives. Let me give you a hard example. Someone in my family was recently hospitalized. For anyone this is a traumatic event filled with fear, anxiety, sadness, anger, hope, compassion and love. In between these emotions I started to notice how the hospital staff, patients and parents were connected. Yes, there were lots of direct face-to-face communications with hospital staff. But the loudspeaker paging systems that used to broadcast the usual ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨Calling Dr. —— ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨ have been replaced with a hospital staff equipped with mobile end-points reducing overhead noise and increasing communications as one-on-one connections replace broadcasts. For patients and parents, WLANs permeated this facility, allowing them internet access for communication with remote family members, checking e-mail, keeping colleagues and clients informed, researching medical journals or even allowing the patient to play a game of internet checkers with a remote family member. Mobile phones served the purpose to keep family members connected while traveling to and from the hospital and provide status and updates. It´s this kind of professional and personal value that mobile networking is adding to every industry sector. Mobile networking and communications value is huge.

A Mobile World

While the mobile industry started with cellular technology providing person-to-person voice communications, the current evolution is based upon access to data applications and back-end enterprise systems for mobile end-points. Some industry personalities talk about Fixed-to-Mobile convergence, but I think its far greater then a convergence. The shift toward mobility is a replacement from the fixed end-point world of today.

The industry is quickly moving beyond simple services that link mobile and fixed end-points such as ringing your mobile end-point while you are away from your desktop. During November, Avaya purchased Traverse and Cisco purchased Orative to connect their enterprise- based IP telephony features and functions with mobile end-points such as calendar synchronization, presence and other enterprise services. The barriers for mobile devices to access enterprise data will be eliminated over time as wireless and wired access technologies become unified. The trend line that is developing for mobile networking is nothing short of huge. By 2010 50% of internet services will be accessed by mobile end-points. Here are a few important data points that I follow and would like to share with you here:

Desktop PC shipment growth will be flat at about 150 million per year out into 2010. At the same time laptop shipments will continue to grow, reaching some 180 million in 2010. Note that laptop shipments have already out paced desktops. The super-high growth is in smartphones, with nearly 300 million shipping in 2010 up from approximately 80 million today. If you layer the hyper-growth of RFID tags into these dynamics, then the number of internet end-points may very well hit one trillion in 2010 up from over a billion today. Note that over 56.5 million high-frequency RFID tag ICs were shipped in 2005 and the market is growing at some 400% CAGR. The bottom line, mobile end-points will be the preferred access method for most people and devices on the planet over the next 5 years.

Clearly the communications end-point is changing towards a mobile device. So what does that mean for the mix of IP phones, softphones and smartphones? Here is some insight into one of my client´s end-point transitions. Over the next 4 years this client will transition its current 150K end-points to the following make up: smartphones will grow from 1K to 60K; office fixed IP phones will transition from 1K to 35K; all employees will have softphones on laptops; the typical employee will have a smartphone and softphone with less than 40% equipped with office IP phones; the total number of end-points will decline from 150K to 110K while the number of employees remains constant at 100K. In short say good by to fixed analog, digital and even IP phones.

One key driver for this change towards mobile end-points is economics. This same client has seen a decline in wire line use of 15% volume and unit cost per year. They see their wireless minute consumption growing at approximately 28% CAGR across multiple mobile providers. The unit cost of mobile vs. wire line is much more favorable to mobile driving wireless minute usage growth way up.

Wither the Mobile Provider?

Mobile service provider pricing, IP end-point devices and high speed wireless technologies are all fueling the mobile world. The mobile industry will be re-structured over the next several years. High powered smartphones with skype, Google talk, et al., softphones with high speed internet access, pose a threat to mobile providers as customers are equipped with an alternative method of voice communications which bypass their mobile wireless plans. Already some smartphones come with skype client software installed allowing consumers to make calls to other skype users for free on mobile devices. As this method improves mobile providers will be hard at work thinking of ways to either block or add value to this feature set. The risk is nothing short of changing the business model for how mobile providers generate revenues and stay in business.

The Corridor Warrior

The boom in mobile networking is primarily due to changes in business. During the last recession businesses pushed decision making down into organizations closer to customers. This transition fostered the real need for mobile businesses. Not only are sales employees the mobile staff, but everyone is now mobile or requires mobile connectivity with access to enterprise e-mail and data.

The hospital example mentioned above is but one example of the new ?¢‚Ǩ?ìCorridor Warrior". Many professionals are mobile within their campus, building, etc., and benefit from a streamlined smartphone with WLAN plus GSM dual mode networking providing access to enterprise resources independent of network connection. For those on the go all day, carrying a laptop as their primary communications tool is too cumbersome. The Corridor Warrior fits many work profiles such as knowledge workers who manage their days by transitioning between conference rooms with little time spent in their offices. The doctors, nurses and hospital staff benefit tremendously by being equipped with a light weight mobile device that allows them to stay in touch via voice or e-mail, plus being able to access patient data. Corridor warrior hospital staff increases the care they provide, reduces mistakes and communication errors which account for nearly 100K preventable hospital deaths per year.

Enterprise Network Architecture Plan

As an IT business decision maker you need a comprehensive mobile networking and communications plan that includes the following:

• Annual service contract with one or two mobile providers
• WLAN plan that incorporates new technologies such as 802.1n and is tightly integrated into wired Ethernet control and service points
• An IP telephony architecture that supports mobility as a key attribute allowing features and functions to be seamlessly supported across fixed and mobile platforms
• An end-point transition plan that outlines fixed, smartphones and softphone end-points over a period of time
• A smartphone requirements statement and implementation plan
• An application development environment plan that serves up enterprise data to mobile end-points
• A network access control plan that protects IT resources from a wide range of access methods

And of course all of the above needs to be defined through the filter of business requirements. But that shouldn´t be too hard as I´m sure most of your business unit´s requirements are way ahead of your mobile networking and communication plans.

Enterprise mobility is all about productivity and work product quality. Just think how much more productive health care providers will be when all of their instrumentation is connected to a network where doctors can access patient vital signs, medical history, medications, etc., right on their smartphones while talking with patients and parents. The quality of the care will increase and so too will patient and parent comfort that the doctors have all the right information to make the right decision.

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by Meru Networks

Enterprises of all types, including universities, K-12, hospitals, utilities, manufacturers, and government agencies are finding the need to deploy an All-Wireless Enterprise ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú a network with wireless as a primary infrastructure. There are compelling business reasons for such an architecture including: 1) increased business pressures to enhance competitiveness while reducing IT costs; 2) a growing dependence on mobile devices that increase productivity; and 3) technological advances that are improving price/performance of broadband wireless communications.

To find out if an All-Wireless Enterprise is right for your company download this paper.

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by Colubris Networks

Enterprises need their wireless infrastructure to be future-proof, similar to their wired Ethernet network. Unfortunately, as they try to add voice and other multimedia applications to the wireless local area network (WLAN), many enterprises today are discovering that their wireless infrastructure is anything but future-proof. To support the next-generation of wireless enterprise applications, WLANs need to be able to accommodate voice, video and data.

To find out how download this white paper.

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I am happy to offer our subscribers a book for the first time. Your workforce is changing, and you need to come up with a strategy for meeting their communications needs : one that reflects well on your leadership and the competitive posture of your organization. This book will provide you with solid information to create your own mobile communications strategy : or help you through the befuddlement caused by all the jargon and hype surrounding mobile technology. Regardless of where you stand, this book can provide the answers you need to make confident decisions, helping to steer your organization through this rapidly changing world of mobile communications.

To get started, download the Mobile Workforce for Dummies book by clicking the link above.

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by DATACOMM RESEARCH COMPANY for Aruba Networks

Fixed-Mobile Convergence (FMC) is touted as the way to provide end-users the same portfolio of services regardless of which devices and networks they happen to be using. There´s just one problem with this definition: It´s long on vision and short on cost-benefit analysis. Fortunately, the FMC value proposition is more compelling. FMC combines different technologies to provide the optimal solution for each requirement. Specifically, FMC harnesses mobile phone networks and wireless local area networks (WLANs) to give end-users the services they want in the places they want, with the best performance and at the lowest cost.

Download this white paper to find out how.

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by Research in Motion (RIM)

A new breed of mobile worker is transforming the workplace: roaming the corridors of factories, offices and other business locations, armed with handhelds linked to a WLAN. Referred to as Corridor Warriors, they benefit from mobile voice and data communications within campuses, satellite sites, warehouses, retail outlets, distribution centers, medical facilities and many other environments. Workers within this increasingly important segment of the mobile workforce, who often belong to a team, share a common need: to stay in touch and stay connected to information throughout the day.

The Corridor Warrior vision elevates communication to a new level, where the strategic benefits and business values may not be readily apparent. Understanding the case for the Corridor Warrior requires relaxing some pre-conceived notions and considering different usage scenarios designed to enhance business productivity and improve efficiency. The business case, as presented in the pages of this paper, is strong and compelling.

To understand the Corridor Warrior business case download this white paper.

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Say good-bye to communication silos. The IT and communications industry are gearing up to change the way corporations use communications and write applications, linking them tightly together. Gone will be separate communications applications such as voice mail, instant messaging, e-mail, conferencing, call centers, et al., as separate and distinct applications. These applications will not go away, but access to them will change. Access will be increasingly more integrated and seamless to users while they become ?¢‚Ǩ?ìcallable" services for IT developers seeking to extract human and system delay from business process. Yes, Microsoft announced Unified Communications last June and its ICA relationship with Nortel in July, but this effort is focused on integrating access to communications with users. The real revolution and boom in communications is the common trend lines of IT and communication industries, toward a common service creation model of web services and SOA. In short the industry is serving up communications-enabled business process and all the major players are participating such as Citrix, Microsoft, BEA, Cisco, Avaya, Siemens, Alcatel, Nortel, IBM, Oracle/Siebel/PeopleSoft, Open Source and SAP. All of these players will be wooing IT developers to write their applications on their platform.

Computing and Communications Industries Adopting Web Services/SOA Service Creation Model

IP networks and web services permit telecommunication-oriented services and business application-oriented services to blend together in ways never before possible in support of simplifying human activities, enriching human collaboration and optimizing business processes. Conditions are right for the development community at large to deliver on the long-awaited promise of innovation over IP. This innovation will not come just from the few thousands proficient in CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) programming, but rather from millions of developers already skilled in coding Java and .NET applications and the business analysts who will compose applications using services-orientated modeling tools and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL).

The Schism: Internet and Web Impart Disruptive Forces on Telecommunications Networks and Service-Creation

Considerable advances made in service-creation efficiencies for telecommunications networks through the early 1990´s were stopped in their tracks just following the advent of the web browser. In the decade spanning 1995 to 2005, as the on-line Internet population expanded from a minority to a majority, the focus and capital investment of the telecommunications industry turned to the network. First telecommunication providers diverted internet dial-up traffic off the public circuit-switched network infrastructure onto a separate IP network for internet. Subsequently telecommunication providers invested in making the IP infrastructure reliable enough to support basic voice services. During this time, billions spent on applications creation efficiency went by the wayside as service innovation ground to a halt as the broadband build-out was born.

While the telecommunication service providers were busy with basic network build-out, the enterprise market was focused on integrating web technologies into their portfolio of corporate IT services. The cost of application integration and maintenance consumes as much as 60% of enterprise IT budgets. The IT vendor community has been serving up a suite of tools to address the most difficult and costly aspects of an IT organization, application integration across different systems to address business process and flows. Companies such as Microsoft, BEA, IBM, Oracle/Siebel/PeopleSoft, Open Source and SAP embrace web services/SOA service creation environment which provide a high degree of cohesiveness in that common tools provide access to development, security, management, operations, etc.

Within the enterprise, service creation efficiencies are driven by:

1. Dominant business applications
2. Infrastructure software vendors
3. Large enterprise´s best practices
4. Commerce-oriented standards organizations such as OASIS and W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

Coming into 2007, businesses are prioritizing growth and new value creation to drive their future technology investments and view SOA governance frameworks as a means to achieve high ROI (Return on Investment) at ever-decreasing TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). With broadband and fiber core build-outs well underway service providers are once again focused on service creation and are using web services/SOA as their architecture. For the first time in the history of communications and computing, both are aligned in service creation strategy, being web services with an SOA governance framework. This synergy will offer massive economies of scale and application interoperability as the nearly $1 Trillion computing and communications industries build services with the same tools. In short, the road ahead for IT developers will be paved with web services/SOA. The first IT application space to be addressed is the breaking down of communication application silos.

Communication Application Silos Can´t be Stitched Together

Some developers may have the view that today´s telephony technology allows for a great deal of flexibility. For example, developers can write programs that turn calls into e-mail and/or audio files. Developers can offer contact center agents the ability to communicate with customers via interactive desktops too. But to enable these communication services requires developers to cross communication silos of e-mail, v-mail, chat, instant messaging, conferencing etc., all with their own set of complexities. IP converges application silos onto one network, but the application integration is still too complex and brittle. To cross these silos developers often find themselves with an ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨n-squared" problem to write to and most importantly to maintain. The ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨n-squared" problem is unsuitable for use as a foundation for business-critical processes.

Enter Session Initiation Protocol: A step in solving the n-squared problem.

SIP will go a long way toward solving the n-squared problem for developers. SIP simplifies multi-modal sessions, meaning communications between different end-points such as hard IP phones, softphones, IM clients, mobile phones, smartphones, etc. SIP will set up and tear down communication sessions with a single set of primitives. When you reach out to someone, SIP tells you which media that person prefers to use to communicate. For example, Jane needs to communicate with Joe and Sally to address an important customer issue. Jane requests a session with Joe and Sally. Joe is on a smartphone while Sally is on a conference call. Sally responds to Jane´s request via an IM and specifies IM as her preference while Joe is available on his smartphone. The session takes place with Joe on his smartphone, Sally on IM and Jane on her softphone. Multi-modal access is powerful because it extends reachability, but it must also be simple to use and access to be useful.

SIP enables seamless connectivity of networking elements and end-points so that both developers and more importantly employees need not be concerned with individual nuances of each communication silo. SIP does make networks flatter and more distributed, eliminating discontinuities between communication silos, but it still requires SIP developers to understand the complex behavior of telecommunications networks and systems. To gain the value of SIP, end-points must be SIP end-points meaning that SIP is a forward migration strategy rather than a backward one.

SIP is a major underpinning for communications-enablement. But it is not the only underpinning because of the need to provide backward migration of an embedded base of systems to gracefully migrate towards SIP IP telephony at an enterprise´s pace. There are still many features only available through traditional TDM communication resources. Some suppliers will expose all communication resources, be they SIP features or non SIP-based features, across a SIP and TDM network to the business developer, without their needing to know the intricacies or transactional behavior of the individual communication resources.

In the reality of today´s mixed communications world, a SIP developer can use SIP to expose features, but this requires a SIP-skilled developer. With web services exposure of SIP features, any IT developer, not just an IP/SIP knowledgeable developer, can utilize SIP features without knowing how SIP, the protocol, works. In short, web services abstracts and hides SIP and other communication protocols into a set of common primitives such as make call, hang up call, transfer call, conference call, etc., so the developer does not need to know the underlying languages and their associated syntax. SIP is a major underpinning of all the major vendors´ application development platforms such as Microsoft, Citrix, Avaya, Cisco, Siemens, Alcatel, Nortel, et al.

Unifying Silos with new tools and technology: SIP, Web Services/SOA

A New Development Environment Emerges

Communications-enabled business process will unify multiple communications modes such as e-mail, IM, chat, voice, v-mail, conferencing, etc., through access. Most think of communications as a means for person to person interaction, but in a communications-enabled business the business process may initiate a call when an exception and intervention is required. People and processes will be able to respond to events in real-time thanks to communications linked to business process. To facilitate these different types of flows, a rules-based platform is required.

Many IP telephony concerns have either offered or soon will be offering application development that incorporates SOA and web services developer constructs to tightly link communications and business applications. For example, a new Avaya Intelligent Communications development platform for integration, orchestration and services-based composition promises to enable the fusion of right-time communications into business applications and processes. Siemens Communications´ OpenScape is their web services/SOA engine. Nortel´s Nortel Application Center takes each of its component applications, e.g., unified messaging and contact center, and builds SOA wrappers around them allowing the applications to share services like reporting and licensing, and in the future design and administration. Cisco´s SOA approach is to embed callable services into the network fabric. It calls this Services Oriented Network Architecture

Unified Communications=Productivity

With IP telephony providers embracing web services/SOA architecture, developers are empowered to provide the entire ?¢‚Ǩ?ìwrap around" to address business issues quickly through collaborative communications. This ?¢‚Ǩ?ìwrap around" goes well beyond SIP and presence, which has occupied the telecommunications industry for some time. SIP and presence is in essence only the beginning.

Consider the requirement for a real time meeting with a group of executives. As a request is made to organize a conference, the communications-enabled business application will know simple but important pieces of information, such as who is on vacation and who is not. For those not available, the communications-enabled business application will know their alternate. Presence, the knowledge and dissemination of one´s on-line state, is driven by personal rules. Presence will clearly be an important piece of information that the communications-enabled business application will use in facilitating an on-line meeting. But the business has its own rules, which could usurp presence´s personal rules. Thus the communications-enabled business application could call in someone on vacation or at home to address an emergency.

While SIP facilitates open interoperability between communication networks, network elements such as gateways and media servers and end-points, it still requires application developers to possess specialized knowledge of real-time communications to enable new value creation. To deliver on the promise of services over IP, next generation service delivery platforms must effectively insulate the business analysts and application developers from the complexity of real-time communications. This is accomplished by development platforms supporting open standards-based services and tools that allow customers to ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨compose" highly differentiating business scenarios that can evolve in real time along with their strategies. Unified communications is delivered through IT developers´ use of SIP, web service/SOA so that application silos are eliminated and replaced by horizontal applications which react to business dynamics.

The Growth of Web Services

Web services/SOA is a powerful force in the IT and telecommunications communities since it addresses the entire supply chain of an enterprise by abstracting the multitude of APIs into a standard set of programming interfaces with SOA-governed business applications. IP telephony suppliers offer real-time communications into an SOA construct by using web services as the main programming interface into real time communication application servers.

Bringing the right information to the right people at the right time will allow business to be efficient. Web services enable convergence and IP telephony infrastructure consolidation to go further up the protocol stack. SIP and SIMPLE are foundational communication-oriented protocols that will, in time, reduce the complexity and cost of the real-time communication infrastructure, bringing multi-modal access as part of the business process. SIP and SIMPLE are callable services which will be available through web services interface.

Current status is that a web service for communications is at the early stage of adoption, but promises to be variable in granularity and useful for businesses to consume and extend. Call recording is the most popular web service for communications today. Web services enablement is simple: make call, hang up, transfer, hold/record, etc. Click-to-call for example is a powerful tool in financial services for power dial applications. In addition to easier communication methods, more and more communication manager administration and end-point configuration will be pushed down to users allowing them to customize their communication experience. Web interfaces allow users to easily turn features on and off.

Conference and office productivity improvements are the current focus of new web services features. Linking to an Outlook calendar and directing calls to a cellular phone when you are out of the office are incremental productivity improvements. Click-to-conference or on demand conference brings communications-enabled business process via web services up to another level. Extending conference capability to include associates, customers, partners with notification and respond starts the linking of communications with a set of business applications. Notifying users of a conference request with situational context increases the value even further. Managing conference attendance increases the value of the system yet again, by triggering an escalation mode if an attendee can´t participate.

But with all these advancements web service implementations can be difficult too. Imagine a siloed application with some web services that call upon the application´s functions. Now multiply that by ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨n" number of siloed applications. You get web services, but you have a mess underneath to maintain. There needs to be a governance to the calling of services which is what SOA provides.

The key to simplifying maintenance is a single composition platform, i.e., middleware that connects to a scaleable media processing infrastructure. Then developers can take discreet parts of communication applications and re-engineer each of those parts into functional blocks of code. From each functional block of code a developer extends a web service, which is an XML-based contract for its respective functional block. The Web Service contract (WSDL) describes the methods of the functional block, such as feature-levels, in a manner which other applications/web services can inspect, dynamically bind to and call upon its methods/features at run time.

Applications can be thought of as one person who does everything. Web services are like a group of people who each perform a specific function towards a unified goal. Web services offers the hope to make communications-enabled application development easier to pull together people who know communications and business process so organizations can communicate more effectively by streamlining business process. Look around at your IT and communications application world because it is all about to change. Say good-bye to silos and hello to unified communications.

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By InteractCRM

There are an estimated 2 billion people worldwide who communicate wirelessly today. For contact centers, extending their operation to support the SMS channel means a faster, simpler and cost-effective way of servicing their customers. Is your contact center ready to handle this changing customer expectation? Do you have the capability to seamlessly extend your current contact center applications to include the SMS channel, while applying the same rules, SLA´s and workflows for inbound / outbound wireless contacts? To find out how download this white paper.

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By Unimax

With Avaya Mailbox Manager and Unimax 2nd Nature

Passwords are one of the most annoying realities in securing IT resources. They are a necessary evil. Most organizations force users to change their passwords to multiple systems creating password fatigue. But this pharmaceutical company needed to streamline the password reset process and support a company goal of employee empowerment. So they deployed Avaya Mailbox Manager and Unimax´s 2nd Nature. The result? Reduced cost and time for resetting passwords. Find out how by downloading this white paper.

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By SOFTEL

Costs associated with password resets are significant. In most cases, password resets involve the IT Help Desk who are skilled live agents taking inbound password reset calls from users. Password resets represent valuable time lost from users who need to regain access and IT Help Desk who restore access. Typically, the IT Help Desk will first verify user identity, implement the reset and finally wrap up the event. Password reset consumes 30% of IT Help Desk call volume (Gartner Group) and with a rate of nearly 2 incidents per user per month (Meta Group). This time spent consumes help desk productivity which takes agent time away from addressing more significant technical issues which are less easily automated. These more pressing issues tend to stay in queue longer while Help Desk agents tend to password reset tasks. A speech-enabled solution provides an efficient, cost-effective means to decrease operational costs and boost productivity, with a rapidly realized Return-On-Investment. Find out how by downloading this white paper.

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by Accuvoice

Cook County was in a jam. It needed to increase three operations: 1) the level of customer service to its citizens; 2) its system capacity for employees of County departments and hospitals; and 3) its ability to handle after-hours inquiries. It needed to all this without hiring additional personnel. So how did it do it? For starters it deployed an Avaya IPT Contact Center over a private network, layered with Avaya and Accuvoice Self Service applications to give callers 24/7 access to County information and databases. To facilitate higher levels of productivity and flexibility among County employees, Cook County deployed an Avaya Mobility Solutions. To find out how Cook County stayed on budget and increased services download this paper.

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By Avaya

This paper provides a roadmap to break down the communication silos that dominate the industry and push it toward a new service-oriented communications architecture approach. The paper defines service oriented architecture or SOA and its new role in creating communications-enabled business process. The paper addresses Session Initiation Protocol or SIP as the new industry standard linking multiple end-point devices and how SIP fits into a new framework of service-oriented communications. The paper does a great job at using sports metaphors to communicate key ideas and concepts. This is one of the best papers on SIP and SOA, download it now using the link above.

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While IP telephony deployment growth rates are doubling every year and projected to get even stronger in 2007, thanks to Microsoft´s Unified Communications, IP contact centers have lagged. Contact center managers are all too aware that they are at the epicenter of customer contact and are fearful of unreliable, unmanageable and un-interoperable systems impacting corporate performance. But how much of this fear is justifiable? Contact center manager´s fears are being tested by a new wave of IP telephony contact centers entering the market equipped to address changing business requirements and booster reliability. Companies such as Avaya, Cisco, Siemens, Nortel, Mitel, Syntellect, Aspect Software, Genesys Telecommunications, NEC and others are promoting SIP-based IP contact centers as a means to lower operational cost, improve agent responsiveness and reporting.

There are three major design approaches to contact centers:

• 1) best-of-breed components where managers design their own contact center;
• 2) bundled suites which are ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨all-in-one" packages; and
• 3) service-based solutions.

These are offered as either a time division multiplexing (TDM) circuit-switched solution, IP telephony solution, or a hybrid of the two.

Until recently, call center technology was designed with TDM-based PBXs, automatic call distribution (ACD) and softswitching, interactive voice response (IVR) systems and voice portals, computer-telephony integration (CTI), universal queuing, Internet e-services, virtual operations, remote agents, outbound dialing and other forms of contact. Important support applications include reporting, analytics, workforce management (WFM), quality assurance and workforce optimization. With the high cost of acquisition, TDM-based call centers were affordable mainly to very large enterprises, disregarding the small and mid- markets. Not only was the economic barrier of entry high, sometimes in the millions of dollars, but disparate call center technologies convoluted the application and associated networking environment, increasing integration efforts with corporate databases thanks to complexity.

But over the past ten years customer contact interaction has changed significantly. Widespread use of voice mail, e-mail, instant messaging, cell phones and web-based applications has enabled new ways in which corporations can connect with customers and prospects. Customers now want around-the-clock access, independent of both end-point device and communications method. Contact center managers call supporting multiple end-point types multi-modal, while supporting multiple communication methods (outbound voice, e-mail, web collaboration, IM, etc.,) multi-channel communications. Both multi-modal and multi-channel are characteristic of the new design challenges confronting contact center architects. IP telephony and SIP are building blocks to support changing contact center design by increasing reliability, management, interoperability and support of multi-modal and multi-channel customer interaction.

Business has changed and so too must contact centers to keep up with customer requirements. The efficient use of labor or agent pools require that contact centers be geographically independent. The race to solve a customer´s issue and time spent with a contact center agent is a competitive advantage. Providing agents with access to enterprise experts who can address a customer´s question, in real time, could lead to up-selling or retaining a customer. Updating corporate data bases after an agent-customer transaction and putting into motion the appropriate workflow creates an efficient business process. These are but a sample of the types of connections, interoperability and flexibility required by modern business and their contact centers.

So are IP contact centers ready for prime time? Can they calm the fears of contact center managers while enabling a more agile enterprise with the tools to address changing customer requirements? Market research says that by 2008 nearly 33% of all contact centers in North American and Europe will go through a refresh phase. This will be a key time period for IP telephony contact center deployment. Contact center design requirements will consist of traditional elements such as reliability, scalability, manageability, security, cost and interoperability with an increased emphasis on customer access, agent access to experts and corporate database integration. Let´s take traditional requirements one by one and explore how an IP telephony-based contact center addresses these challenges.

Reliability: Reliability can also be viewed in terms of availability, that is can IP contact centers achieve five-nines availability or is the contact center available 99.999% of the time? Five-nines translate into 5.26 minutes of downtime a year. Two key design aspects define availability: first, a component´s mean time between failure or MTBF and its mean time to repair or MTTR define its availability by MTBF/(MTBF+MTTR); second, how components are interconnected into network has calculable ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨system" availability.

For over a year now, communication managers or the devices that set up and tear down connections have the same MTBF and MTTR ratings as TDM-based PBXs. IP telephony contact center network designs are distributed and de-centralized. TDM-based contact centers are highly centralized with single points of failure. IP contact centers are modeled as parallel systems thanks to redundancy and packet network attributes while TDM call centers are serial systems. Availability for serial and parallel system is calculated as such:

As=A1*A2
Ap=A1 + A2 – A1*A2

While the electrical engineer in me is tempted to fully develop the two equations, let´s just make some observations. First A1 and A2 are component availabilities while As and Ap are series and parallel system availability. The key lesson to learn from the above two equations is that in serial designs system availability is always less than the availability of its components while a parallel design system availability is always greater than the availability of its components.

In short, the IP contact center design offers more options to improve system reliability than its TDM-based architecture. If availability is less than the stated number of nines reliability, the designer could be adding parallel Ethernet switches, redundant servers, WAN links, etc., to increase system reliability. IP contact center designers have more options to manage reliability and availability than legacy TDM.

Scalability: Today´s IP contact centers scale down better than a TDM-based system. Most recent IP contact center vendor announcements focus on small to medium sized business as IP and standard computing hardware have lowered the barrier of contact center entry. IP contact centers have been proven for large global companies with greater than 20,000 employees as over one third are currently evaluating or piloting the technology.

Manageability: Device management of routers, switches, servers and end-points are just as potent as device management of TDM call centers. Support applications such as reporting, analytics, workforce management (WFM), quality assurance, workforce optimization, etc., are offered by contact center vendors and are increasingly being opened to a wide range of ISVs or independent software vendors. With ISVs now focused on various aspects of contact center management and support, creativity and value is being created around a vendor´s contact center offering.

Management and support applications are a major bright spot in IP contact centers as corporations will increasingly have more choice available to them versus waiting for their contact center vendor to develop management and support applications. Most contact center vendors have created ecosystems of partners designed to encourage application development upon their contact center platform. This ecosystem competition between suppliers will spur innovation and choice for enterprises well beyond what has been available in the TDM age.

Security: Building defenses to secure an IP contact center is different than in a TDM environment. Clearly exploits have the potential to propagate throughout an IP network and infect contact center agents, data, applications, etc. While there are many defenses for IP networks such as firewalls, IDS, IPS, NBAD or network-based anomaly detection devices plus network access and protection control, IP networks do pose a greater effort and expense to secure contact centers. Some firms, such as American Express, have chosen to limit connections between contact center and corporate production networks through firewalls. If IP contact centers are fully connected to production networks, then an overall network security strategy needs to be defined and implemented so as to mitigate the risk of exploits causing harm to its operations.

Cost: This is a key attribute of IP contact centers; its acquisition cost relative to TDM-based systems is lower. IP contact center cost savings stem from the following: standard computing hardware to run applications, soft and thin client agents reduce end-point cost, leverage existing IP network and computing operational support services.

For example, one of my clients required a contact center in a location that was not previously equipped. It has deployed an IP contact center in another facility and was thus able to quickly deploy a 600 person contact center over two sites. We estimated that this client saved $1M thanks to its existing IP telephony contact center. In other words it would have cost this company $1M more to deploy a traditional call center with PBX and ACD equipment.

Interoperability: While there is much differentiation between vendors, one of the key areas for contact center managers to analyze is a vendor´s migration plan to IP. Contact centers will not transition or cut over to IP contact centers over night. There will be a phased migration resulting in a hybrid TDM/IP system in place for many years. Interoperability between TDM and IP provides incumbent contact center vendors with an advantage.

Another key interoperability area is with application development environments, especially web services and SOA. More on this below.

Multi-modal and Multi-channel Customer Access: Thanks to Session Initiation Protocol or SIP, IP telephony contact centers can support a wide range of end-points and communication channels. As SIP is an IETF open internet standard most, if not all, main stream contact center vendors have embraced it as their vehicle to support multi-modal and multi-channel customer access.

Agent Access to Experts: This is another key SIP and IP telephony benefit of IP contact centers. Agents equipped with their own expert buddy list upon which they can leverage during important customer discussions is a major value add. Agents have been building ad hoc ways of reaching back into the enterprise for years. Many use public IM services to find experts within their own enterprise to address customer issues. This opens up security vulnerabilities, is not measurable and does not provide journaling. The effectiveness of the agent reaching into the enterprise for assistance is situational upon the agent´s experience and the size of their professional network. Enterprises can systematize this and measure it so knowledge workers can be part of an agent´s network. SIP is a standard approach to increasing an agent´s professional network so that customers can be up sold, or their time spent with an agent reduced and issue resolved with a single agent.

Corporate database integration: Contact center evolution is focused on expanding an agent´s pool of resources to include knowledge workers and linking agent interactions with business applications and process. Here is where IP telephony, SIP and web services come together to deliver value far greater than TDM systems could.

True, developers can write programs that turn calls into e-mail and/or audio files based upon TDM architecture. Developers can offer contact center agents the ability to communicate with customers via interactive desktops too. But to enable these communication services requires developers to cross communication silos of e-mail, v-mail, chat, instant messaging, etc., all with their own set of complexities. IP converges application silos onto one network, but the application integration is still too complex and brittle. To cross these silos developers often find themselves with an ?¢‚Ǩ?ìn-squared" problem to write to and most importantly to maintain. The ?¢‚Ǩ?ìn-squared" problem is unsuitable for use as a foundation for business-critical processes.

The short term product improvements from contact center providers will enable a longer term goal of communications-enabled business process. Many of the above mentioned vendors are either offering or are planning to offer development platforms which abstract the complexities of their proprietary protocols as well as telephony specific APIs such as JTAPI, TAPI, CTI I and CTI II, SIP for web services/SOA. As web services are embraced, IT departments will then have the tools to reliably add communications to business process.

Communications software as a web service that can be massively consumed at a business level without the heavy burden of CTI-style integration, provided that web service is underpinned by an SOA, offers enormous opportunities for developers and enterprises. IT departments will be empowered to link communications to corporate databases, workflow and knowledge management software and other resources to support business decision-making.

IT departments will increasingly contribute to a discussion on how to improve and transform what a business does and how it does it. IT, system integrators and independent software vendors will be able to look at a business´s current applications and determine, based on business process demands, what elements need to be re-factored into discrete intelligent communication services. Gone are the days of writing communication applications without the knowledge, rules and assumptions of the business process.

Web services will tighten the linkage between agents and their enterprise back office systems. After an agent´s interaction with a customer and transaction is completed, the enterprise needs to know what occurred and to take action upon it. This linking of agents to back office systems and enabling a more structured way in which they can reach into the enterprise are opportunities that contact center managers are seizing today.

So are IP telephony contact centers ready for prime time? From reliability, scalability, management, security, cost and interoperability points of view the answer is yes. But enterprises continue to have a lot of legacy, which will not change any time soon. Integrating legacy contact centers into an IP and Web Services/SOA environment offers tremendous areas of opportunity for contact center managers to add value to their corporation. Getting started is the important part with a phased migration plan that allows TDM and IP contact centers to interoperate and evolve. But you can bet that with 30% of contact centers being refreshed over the next three years, a very large percentage of them will be IP contact centers.

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By IQ Services

Voice business solutions involve menu-driven processes that allow customers to perform a wide range of self-service activities. A key requirement for successfully implementing and maintaining these business solutions is the ability to test them before and after they have been deployed, in order to confirm they work as designed. To thoroughly test the solution, every path a customer can take, including those associated with entry errors, must be tested. Within the industry, this kind of testing is referred to by many different names including, ?¢‚Ǩ?ìunit level testing," ?¢‚Ǩ?ìfeature testing," ?¢‚Ǩ?ìfunction testing," ?¢‚Ǩ?ìregression testing," ?¢‚Ǩ?ìflow testing" or ?¢‚Ǩ?ìdialog traversal testing." The purpose of this white paper is to discuss the testing requirement as it relates to voice business solutions. IQ Services refers to this type of testing as ?¢‚Ǩ?ìFeature/Function Testing."

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By synTelate Corp.

The contact center agent is the first and sometimes the only contact a customer may have with the company. In today´s environment of increasingly demanding consumers and ever tighter profit margins, many organizations have become dependant on their contact centers to generate revenue or to maintain customer loyalty through the provision of efficient and effective customer service. Even with these high level strategic objectives as the main drivers for the contact center itself, there is often a lack of detailed attention given to how agents perform specific tasks and whether or not they have the correct tools at their disposal to make sure the contact center achieves its overall objectives as efficiently as possible. This white paper looks at the vital role the contact center agent plays in customer service and examines how the provision of accurate, timely and relevant information via the desktop PC can impact the overall efficiency of the contact center.

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By Citrix

Converged applications have been positioned as entirely new applications that were not possible before IP telephony. In reality, the applications that offer the highest value to IP telephony are existing phone applications and call-control functions that have been redesigned to take advantage of these new IP telephones and converged infrastructure as well as computers and wireless devices such as cell phones and PDAs. This white paper will show that the real value of IP telephony applications is not in over-hyped, ?¢‚Ǩ?ìwhiz-bang," industry-specific applications, but rather because it centers on delivering existing telephony applications and call-control functions with vastly improved usability.

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By Avaya

Over the past three years, the discussion of IP telephony has transitioned from ?¢‚Ǩ?ìwhat is it?" and ?¢‚Ǩ?ìhow does it work?" toward ?¢‚Ǩ?ìwhy should I use it?" The purpose of this paper is to answer the more specific question, ?¢‚Ǩ?ìWhy should I use VoIP and IP telephony in the contact center?" The compelling value of IP telephony is not just about creating converged networks with its toll (long-distance) call avoidance and simpler Moves, Adds, and Changes (MACs). The significant business value is in a continuum of contact center solutions that include: Voice Server Consolidation, Virtual Site Consolidation, Enterprise Resource Optimization and Contact Center Globalization.
All of these solutions cost justify themselves in stand-alone implementations. However, the true power to alter business fundamentals is unleashed when these solutions are deployed in combination across the solution continuum. Find out how by downloading this white paper.

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By AGN Networks

While all the IP telephony vendors have embraced SIP proxys and end-points, service providers are starting to offer SIP trunking between facilities. SIP trunking eliminates gateways, legacy PRI and POTS lines enabling end-to-end SIP connectivity between sites, reducing WAN charges and extending features. SIP functionality includes features such as Instant Messaging, Presence Management, centralized call control, and simplified Moves, Adds and Changes. In this white paper AGN Networks describes SIP trunking and the value of building a multi-site IP telephony with SIP trunks.

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