CONVERGENCE - IT'S NOT ALL OR NOTHING

Convergence – It’s not all or nothing

While strategic, wholesale adoption of converged networks may not be feasible in today’s investment-lite environment, tactical future-proof implementations are delivering real business benefits, argues Chris de Silva, managing director of Philips Business Communications.

Converged networks have been on the agenda for almost a decade. And the benefits are well understood: converging voice, data and video traffic on to one network provides economies of scale, reduces management of infrastructure and consolidates skill resource requirements.

However, to date, economic factors have combined with technology concerns to constrain widespread adoption of converged solutions. Until recently, the high cost of the technology was a significant barrier to entry. Networks could not deliver the capacity or bandwidth to support the applications required for tangible return on investment.

As the technology has matured, the reality of convergence and the delivery of robust IP telephony solutions have become increasingly viable. The widespread use of Quality of Service (QOS) enabled devices, for example, is delivering lower cost network capacity and significant performance improvements.

However, while technology considerations are no longer a barrier to adoption, too often organisations keen to leverage the benefits of IP telephony are faced with the unpleasant choice of making widespread infrastructure changes prior to any deployment – irrespective of how far they wish to go at the outset. This demands significant up front investment, which is usually not available given current funding strategies. In these pragmatic times, organisations are unwilling to dispose of legacy systems and infrastructure to achieve a wholesale adoption of a converged communications network.

This short-sighted approach by many technology providers is in danger of undermining the credibility of converged communications technology. This ‘all or nothing’ choice is not only unviable; it is simply not true.

Convergence is not about wholesale IP adoption but the tactical delivery of appropriate converged technologies to meet specific organisational requirements with quantifiable business benefit. IP is the enabling technology – a means to an end. It is the applications, from call management to call centre solutions, running across the IP network that deliver the real business benefit. For example, Philips Business Communications can already deploy IP DECT for customers, delivering the freedom of mobility to users located throughout an IP WAN environment.

Technology vendors and channel communities need to boost significantly their understanding of customer requirements and how voice applications can be deployed to meet those needs. This in-depth understanding of customer needs will, more often than not, lead to a realisation that the immediate adoption of a 100% native (peer-to-peer) IP telephony system is not the answer. There are, of course, situations where this is likely to be the right course of action. An organisation opening a new facility or branch office should take the opportunity to install a single IP infrastructure for voice and data to attain significant initial and ongoing cost savings.

In the majority of situations, however, a hybrid IP solution is best suited to meet current and future requirements, rather than just future. The best hybrid approach enables an organisation to be 100% native IP at one end of the spectrum, 100% traditional (TDM) telephony at the other end of the spectrum, and any combination in between. This gives an organisation freedom to choose how fast they wish to go, enabling a cost-effective migratory strategy for convergence to be adopted. An enterprise will be able to move to the new technology when it delivers a real business benefit – in stages if it wishes. As such, in addition to enabling organisations to retain elements of their legacy systems, a good hybrid solution provides an achievable investment opportunity, while delivering future proofing.

At the end of the day, voice is another application to be hosted on the IP network. It is therefore critical that the choice of a solutions provider is made on the basis of their experience in delivering voice and related applications, as well as a good understanding of networking infrastructure.

Vendors and solutions providers that are approaching convergence from the data side face the very real challenge of understanding the requirements associated with the development, delivery and support of voice and related applications on a converged infrastructure.

Some of the leading voice specialists, meanwhile, have been building and strengthening their data skills over the past few years as well as widening their portfolio through strategic partnerships with selected data vendors. They have also been porting their applications onto an IP infrastructure – offering the end user more sophisticated and proven solutions with lower risk.

There is no doubt that there is still a need for evangelising the benefits of converged networking. Debate about the relative merits and supposed threats of converged communications will continue to take place at both a vendor and customer level. However, as long as the customer’s best interests are being served – and they will be if the applications are available – the speed at which the transition takes place from separate voice and data networks to a converged network is not the be-all and end-all.