11 April 2017
Using instant messaging, presence, video, web meetings are now all common ways to connect with co-workers and customers. UC is therefore said to be a reality and represents the way most people work.
No longer just a ‘marketing buzzword’, unified communications are now considered to be the norm for enterprise communications. But there are still challenges ahead, as JAMES HAYES finds out.
Start spreading the news (via your messaging medium of choice) that unified communications has at last established itself as the core enterprise application it always wanted to be.
It’s taken time. Only a year ago Networking+ reported that UC’s prospects for mainstream take-up were still uncertain (see pp11-13, Apr 2016). But successively upward market forecasts, along with a stream of customer contracts, indicate that investment in UC solutions has grown across a range of public and privates sector verticals, and that demand is worldwide.
Analysts’ predictions for growth are upbeat. Grand View Research expects the worldwide UC market to be worth $143.49bn by 2024, with uptake propelled by factors such as international enterprise expansion, public sector efficiency drives, and increased needs for real-time inter-organisational information exchange.
Rival research firm Global Market Insights takes a slightly conservative view of growth. It expects a rise in mobile device uptake to drive UC demand over the next five years and forecasts a market value of $96bn by 2023 – still a figure that other application sectors would envy.
“There are multiple business factors driving UC adoption,” says Phil Mottram, director of enterprise at Vodafone. “These can include the need for efficiency gains, greater workforce agility and collaboration, as well as requirements for consistency and compliance across the business. Another added benefit is ‘true’ convergence – one system that knows who you are, where you are, and what device you’re on, irrespective of network connectivity.”
But UC still faces challenges – some new, some old. Despite suggestions that the drive toward cloud-hosted or managed services have driven UC’s recent fortunes, a significant number of adopters want to overlay platforms on existing or enhanced network infrastructures. Questions can arise over the quantification of UC’s tangible ROI in such environments, especially with respect to scalability: in short, will UC continue to justify its capex and opex as it is deployed to expanded workforces, especially internationally?
Leap of faith
There is also the question of whether unified communications constitute a defined technology or even industry, where solutions providers seem content to sell platforms that provide limited interoperability between proprietary systems, and thereby mimic the supplier lock-in that non-unification, arguably, is supposed to be an antidote to.
It also seems strange that, in view of the evidence of a multi-billion-dollar market, UC is still called a ‘marketing buzzword’ in some quarters. Todd Carothers, marketing and sales EVP at Canadian UC software specialist CounterPath, says this is not a fair way to describe communications that are truly unified. “The word ‘unified’ is a strong one, suggesting across-the-board collaboration, and I understand the cynicism surrounding these terms considering how many tools have been defined by vendor lock-in, hardware replacement, or expensive software licenses.”
Carothers believes that a new and truer breed of UC solutions are now entering the marketplace, offering solutions that integrate more flexibly with existing servers and hardware, and making a more flexible, ‘pick-and-mix’ style user experience possible.
For Greg Zweig, director of solutions marketing at US-based IP-based communications software provider GENBAND, the term ‘UC’ no longer matters: “The reality is that UC, at least the way the industry conceived it 20 years ago, is now how most people work. Instant messaging, presence, video, web meetings – these are all common ways to connect with co-workers and customers. Unfortunately, many of these solutions are still silos with separate passwords, directories, user interfaces. But the basic elements of UC are the de facto norm for communications.”
As well as these silos, another integration issue that has hampered UC is that, while some features may add value to user needs, others seem superfluous or already performed by diverse incumbent applications, apps or services. The justification for UC therefore becomes ‘bitty’.
In order to gain full value from UC, Carothers believes you need a leap of faith in the whole kit-and-caboodle, and to own up to the limitations in the use of non-unified comms options.
“There are multiple vendor offerings that all provide slightly different applications, between many of which there is crossover. Skype, for example, offers something like UC, but in a Skype way. What if a customer wants to customise and add the functionality of a disparate platform? It won’t work.”
Adrian Hipkiss, VP and MD at ShoreTel, insist that quality of service is the big issue here. “Getting good voice and video quality, and how this is seamlessly integrated with all the other ways you need to interact, is so important. There are other [non-unified options for] setting-up these interactions, sure, but dropping in and out of these adds-up in lost time and productivity on a scale that matters – especially if you are a service business.
“You can try using consumer UC apps, but these fall down on the quality issue again and on the basic phone functionality businesses now need. Try to transfer a Skype call to a colleague, for example, and tell me how easy that is.”
Zweig agrees that it would not be sensible to suggest that consumer apps are appropriate for business: “Would you be happy if your bank used Skype to manage your accounts? Would it be okay if your local hospital used Facetime to manage medical records?”
He also seems to sound a note of exasperation when he says that the ROI conversation is getting “tired” as it suggests that putting a traditional phone on employees’ desks is sufficient. “We can’t rant about the fact that no-one uses their phone anymore and then suggest that modern UC features are superfluous. Users need mobility, they need presence and messaging, to be productive.”
Craig Walker, head of cloud services at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE) suggests that business requirements will eventually reach levels of complexity that even enterprise-class diversified solutions are not designed to cope with – which is why perspicacious organisations go UC sooner rather than later.
“In an increasingly-mobilised workforce, the deployed solution needs to be as intuitive as possible – just work (without having to think about it) and preferably be embedded into the business applications and processes used. What gives well integrated UC solutions an edge is when they get out of the way of the users’ core activity and fade into the background. Only when IT departments start to think about deploying unified communications and not a UC solution will businesses create real ROI.”
For Mark Russell, director of operations at Swyx, this element of integration with business applications is another key attribute in UC’s favour, because network managers like technology that reduces the number of critical integration management points for them to deal with. He reckons that the UC solutions that stand out are those that can provide full integration with third-party applications and data sources.
“The promise of what’s being coined ‘contextual communications’ enables users to not only converge different communications types on a single platform, but also support more ‘intelligent’ conversations because they have the relevant CRM data in front of them on a single display. These forms of true UC, that tap into external information or other cues such as location, more readily support personalised interactions and a better customer experience – a priority for the C-suite.”
Other UC observers flag-up security as an issue that should not be underestimated in the quest to unify a panoply of communications endpoints which may have relied on their own device-specific safeguards.
Kevin Baynes, UK and Ireland country manager at Sonus, points out that UC is often the forgotten application among CISOs, and warns it will be more vulnerable and open to attacks in 2017: “UC is not just the voice call anymore – it’s video, file sharing, messaging, etc. And now that it’s moved to IP, [it is] inherently more vulnerable to being exploited.”
In-house or in cloud?
In the meantime, one of the most challenging decisions UC adopters have to make is whether it is best to deploy a platform over an existing or upgraded on premise network infrastructure and manage it in-house; or host it in the cloud but still manage it in-house-manage; or to outsource it completely as a managed cloud-based service.
The percentage of organisations that prefer to keep things in-house remains high: UC solutions accounted for some 60 per cent of the overall market share in 2015-2016, according to Grand View Research reports, due to factors like ease of customisation and control, and security. But of course, in-house means having IT personnel on 24x7 stand-by to ensure the system delivers to expectations.
“Businesses face the choice of where to deploy a UC system, who manages it, and how it is acquired,” says ALE’s Walker. “The vast majority will not be able to simply rip-and-replace existing [network infrastructure] investments to add-in UC capabilities.”
He goes on to predict that most UC solutions deployed over the next few years will end up being a hybrid of on-premise and cloud-based systems. Jon Seddon, head of product at managed service provider GCI, says cloud has made the deployment of UC easier for the simple reason that it has become easier to integrate systems with existing solutions.
“Very few customer sites are ‘greenfield’, and organisations are typically not keen on a ‘rip-and-replace’ strategy – at least not straight away. Cloud has helped by making the old and new work together, until the customer can fully migrate. Being able to deploy directly to multiple devices, and keep them constantly updated and patched, is a undoubtedly a lot simpler when they are cloud-connected.”
Seddon continues by claiming cloud service providers have built a “rich ecosystem” of interlocking elements. “Many of the previous hurdles of UC adoption – from integration with legacy systems to providing fully-fledged contact centre functionality – are no longer present.”
Vodafone’s Mottram says there are a number of benefits to running UC in the cloud. For instance, software upgrades can be managed centrally, and services can be scaled up and down much faster. As a result, network managers can then focus on the business requirements, service innovation roadmap.
But Zweig is not so sure about a UC future in the cloud. He reckons the majority of new deployments are being driven from the cloud. While there are exceptions here, such as hospitals, banking and defence, he believes cloud is quickly taking over as the deployment model of choice. “That said, regardless of where the session control is based, media is still going to travel across the LAN and WAN.”
VoIP – the ‘petrol in the UC engine’
Some experts point out that network readiness is often-overlooked in a UC transition. They warn that no matter how much you invest in applications, if the connectivity on which they run is impacting quality, you’re going to have problems created by, for example, rising volumes of traffic running between regions on different networks, or employees increasingly using video for internal calls.
“Voice and messaging are rarely a major threat to network capacity,” says Zweig. “If an organisation is undergoing a major upgrade to its communications, the variable to watch is desktop video-conferencing. These sessions can easily use 1-4Mbps of bandwidth, creating congestion on lower capacity WAN links as well as a strain on internet capacity.”
Even so, when it comes to bandwidth availability, every little helps. What happens when network managers anxious to extract maximum value from their UC investment consider moving voice traffic entirely to mobile networks? Would UC still qualify for the nomenclature without a VoIP component? Not according to CounterPath’s Carothers.
“VoIP is a key component as it ties in directly to the IP-based architecture of UC, plus it enables voice to be leveraged in a different way. Regarding the latter, it enables users to engage with UC in a way you cannot do with non-VoIP services. For example, datagrams can be sent with valuable information about a UC session that includes specifics about the meeting, such as calendar, participant, location, etc. VoIP is important because it is based on IP – and therefore can easily be integrated into almost any application on the planet – UC and beyond.”
Swyx’s Russell agrees that it’s “crazy” to talk about UC without a VoIP component, despite the ubiquitous and growing use of mobiles for business communications. “Having VoIP as part of your corporate infrastructure ensures that all calls are controlled centrally and directed to the most appropriate department or individual, not to mention giving you the ability to contextualise calls with back-office applications. While devices used for communication will change over time – mobile phones are soon likely to become ‘VoIP phones’ – VoIP is essentially the ‘petrol’ in the UC ‘engine’ and cannot run without it.”
But Patrick Harper, CTO with web conferencing and collaboration technology specialist PGi, is less dogmatic about the possibility of VoIP-less UC. He believes UC is all about taking a strategic and diversified approach to enterprise collaboration and communication tools. “While VoIP isn’t going away anytime soon, with advancements towards 5G and HD calling becoming the standard, we’ll see a shift towards a mobile preference for conference communication.”
ALE’s Walker concurs: “UC does not need to contain VoIP. The telephony aspect can be analogue, digital, or IP or GSM voice (not over the data channel), as well as VoIP. UC absolutely needs to have real-time communications – voice and or video – to qualify for the ‘unified’ nomenclature, otherwise it’s just ‘Asynchronous Communications’.”
The shape of things to come: what to watch out for in UC this year
KEVIN BAYNES, UK and Ireland country manager for Sonus, predicts what to expect in unified comms during 2017.
Session Border Controllers offer real-time security platforms that are application aware.
SIP trunking gets the respect it deserves
Last year, BT made a bold statement announcing that by 2025 it will switch off ISDN trunking in favour of adopting SIP trunking. While SIP trunking has already taken off in the US, European enterprises have yet to make the investment. With a huge, untapped market for SIP trunking services, especially for enterprises that are looking for ways to unify communications and cut costs (i.e. just about every enterprise), I predict that SIP trunking will get the attention it deserves in 2017.
Microsoft’s cloud PBX is set to take off
In 2015, Microsoft rolled out PSTN calling. While its initial country availability was limited, today it’s growing thanks to Microsoft Cloud Connector Edition (CCE). This solution is providing businesses, whose countries don’t have PSTN calling, with an option to adopt cloud PBX and integrate local PSTN services. I predict enterprises will begin rapidly deploying CCE to enjoy the benefits of hybrid cloud communications instead of waiting for a PSTN calling option to become available in their country. I also think they will look for integrated vendor solutions that let them migrate seamlessly to cloud PBX while they sweat legacy investments they aren’t ready to get rid of.
Increased need for security
UC will be more vulnerable and open to attacks in 2017. UC isn’t just the voice call anymore – it’s video, file sharing, messaging, etc. – and now that it has moved to IP, it provides a much richer set of capabilities and is inherently more vulnerable to being exploited. To protect and secure UC, firms need a new application-aware solution – a real-time security platform purpose-built for real-time services known as a Session Border Controller.
