WALK, RUN OR JUMP INTO CONVERGENCE?

Jon Brooke, Head of Operations at Philips Business Communications suggests that the speed of deployment needs to be determined by the requirements of the customer, which tend to be less governed by the underlying technology and more by the availability of the applications capable of delivering real business benefits.

The concept and theory of convergent networks has been a discussion point for more than ten years now. The mooted benefits of a single network within an enterprise, delivering voice, video and data, were many, but technological and economical factors limited the feasibility of networks with the capacity and performance to deliver these services.

More recently, the reality of convergence and the delivery of robust IP telephony solutions has increasingly come to the fore, fuelled by the decreasing cost of network capacity and significant performance improvements brought about by factors such as widespread use of Quality of Service (QOS) enabled network devices.

However, enterprises are often unwilling to dispose of legacy systems and infrastructure to introduce a “new” converged communications network. The benefits of pure peer-to-peer IP telephony may not be immediately enticing enough to make these organisations take the plunge.

We all need to wake up and smell the coffee when it comes to the convergence debate. The actual end-user within an organisation really isn’t concerned about the infrastructure on which the traffic is carried, as long as the applications they require to do their job are available and work reliably. Whilst there are benefits to using IP for a converged environment, it really is just an enabler and we need to make sure that we do not lose sight of the fact that it’s all about the applications.

The requirement is for the vendor and channel communities to understand their customers’ business more closely and make recommendations as to which applications will most effectively deliver the required functionality. If the right applications can be put on the platform, regardless of the underlying technology, the customer sees the added value and benefit. We already have applications such as IP DECT available, delivering the freedom of mobility to users located throughout an IP WAN environment.

Convergence is therefore less a function of the platform or infrastructure used and more a function of the experience enabled by applications.

If the customers’ needs have really been understood, then it is less likely that the immediate adoption of a 100% native IP telephony system is the answer. There are, of course, situations where this is the right course of action – for example in a completely new facility or in a new branch office where the opportunity to install a single IP infrastructure for voice and data presents significant initial and ongoing cost savings.

In the majority of situations, a hybrid IP solution is best suited to meet current and future requirements, rather than just future. The use of a hybrid approach enables an organisation to be 100% IP at one end of the spectrum, 100% TDM at the other end of the spectrum, and any combination in between. This approach therefore enables a migratory strategy for convergence to be adopted, as an enterprise will only move to a new technology when it delivers a real business benefit.

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 of delivering voice and related applications. There are a number of vendors and solutions providers who are approaching convergence from the data side, where they have been known for the provision of infrastructure and bandwidth, rather than applications. But there is a bigger gulf in capability for infrastructure providers who must learn to develop, deliver and support voice applications on their infrastructure. Experienced voice application specialists are simply porting their mature applications onto an IP infrastructure – offering the end user more sophisticated solutions with lower risk.

There is no doubt that the need for evangelising the benefits of converged networking remain. 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. This process has to follow a phrase much bandied in the mobile telephony market – evolution not revolution!