Unified Communication - Improve Employee Delivery System.

Introduction.

Business communication technology is constantly evolving as employees seek better ways to reach co-workers and customers faster. For many enterprises, the next stage in this evolution is Unified Communications (UC), as it allows organizations to communicate and collaborate more efficiently, more accurately and in real-time regardless of location.

To bolster collaboration and communication of an increasingly distributed workforce, UC weaves together technologies such as Internet Protocol (IP)-PBX; voice over IP (VoIP); voice mail; Web, audio- and video-conferencing; presence; e-mail, unified messaging (UM) and instant messaging (IM); and various flavors of mobility.

Unified Communications is prone to market confusion as the term, at times, is misapplied by vendors and misused by analysts. The goal of this article is to offer a clearer understanding of UC essentials; the UC market; how to analyze your UC needs; and a how-to-buy guide that analyzes solution, cost and vendor considerations as well as suggesting a short list of solutions and vendors to suit your needs.

Unified Communications: The Top Reasons Why Businesses Buy?

1. Elimination of communications silos: Businesses recognize the need to integrate voice and telephony with other communications modes. The legacy approach of having silos for each mode — telephony, fax, email, video, etc. — is seen now as being costly and inefficient.
2. Lower cost of communications: UC consolidates the aforementioned modes, which is more cost effective than maintaining them separately. Many UC offerings also have a hosted component, reducing or eliminating the need for capital-intensive hardware, especially around the phone system.
3. Improved collaboration: Businesses see the possibilities for better collaboration among employees, as well as improved personal productivity, both of which can provide competitive advantage.
4. Simplified IT: IT is under increasing pressure to do more with less, and UC offers a way to do this, long with simplifying their operational needs.
5. Strategic Initiative: Businesses are at a point where leaders are thinking more strategically about communications, not just in terms of the investment level, but about what it can do to make the business perform better. UC is more than just an IT domain, as it speaks to making all employees more effective in their jobs as well as better team players.
6. Innovation: Businesses understand that IP and Web-based communications are rife with innovation, these new applications will benefit their business, and UC represents the best way to do it.

Your Needs

There are three major motivations for implementing in UC: to reduce costs, to improve collaboration and communications and/or to enable key business processes.

Cost Reduction :There are lots of ways to reduce costs with unified communications; heading the list are reduced travel, reduced administration/TCO, and improved productivity.

Reduced Travel: The justification for video conferencing has always been based on reducing travel, but video was only one mode and an expensive one at that. UC has the potential to democratize video and put a camera on every desktop at the office and/or at home. Combined with richer collaboration tools such as desktop-sharing, a lot more can be done than before. Factor in the increased costs and dramatically increased hassle factor of traveling and the business case becomes quite strong. The hassle factor is especially important. You can’t get through security at an airport in less than an hour anymore, and you can’t take a suitcase easily either.

Reduced Administration: This goes back to centralization enabled by VoIP, SIP, and broadband. This is the first time since the invention of the PBX that a branch office may not need a PBX anymore. Either simply place remote phones there and/or a gateway. These gateways have a come a long way and now companies such as Microsoft, Avaya, and Mitel offer survivable gateways that can fail over to local POTS lines should a WAN failure occur. Centralizing administration reduces costs in lots of ways — each branch PBX is expensive, requires administration, and requires peak circuits for peak capacity. The switch maintenance costs and circuit costs are recurring and add up.

Product Consideration

1. Network interoperability: There are a number of ways to develop UC solutions, and you want a minimum of compatibility problems to make it work. Investigate potential issues around how well the solution will interoperate with your existing phone system and network infrastructure.
2. Scalability: It is not safe to assume that all UC solutions scale equally, a consideration most relevant for larger enterprise.
3. Provider reach: Aside from being able to support a large number of sites, you need to know that a potential provider can serve all your locations. The more geographically dispersed your sites are, the more of challenge this could be.
4. Mobility: While demand for mobility is growing, you need to consider what types of devices/endpoints the solution will support, along with which specific vendors and operating systems. UC providers will have widely varying capabilities here, and if you are heavily invested in a particular mobile deployment, this could be a deal-maker or -breaker.
5. Pricing models: Pricing models can vary widely, as there are many variables that impact the overall expenditure. The key driver could be amortizing the hardware investment, bandwidth consumption, or the price of voice minutes. To avoid surprises, you must know your usage patterns, or work closely with the provider to craft a pricing plan that best reflects this.
6. Feature parity for telephony: The better you understand your current feature set, especially the ones you use most often, the better prepared you will be to evaluate UC offerings. Among telecom vendors, voice feature sets for UC will likely match what you have now, but other types of vendors probably will not.
7. Support for applications: App support is an important part of the evolving value proposition for UC. Capabilities here — not just to support applications, but also develop them — will vary widely. This holds for all types of solutions, even among those from telecom vendors.

Pertemuan Sahabat Lama Dalam Wajah Baru

Pada hari ini saya berkesempatan bertemu seorang sahabat lama yang saya kenali pada tahun 1986. Beliau adalah anak melayu pertama yang pernah menjawat jawatan sebagai Director Regional Communication South East Asia & Pacific syarikat gergasi telekomunikasi dunia iaitu Nokia. Beliau meletak jawatan sebagai pengarah komunikasi syarikat Nokia kerana berhasrat memulakan perniagaan sendiri dalam bidang telekomunikasi. Kalau Tony Fernandez, terkenal sebagai usahawan yang membangunkan syarikat penerbangan Air Asia berkonsepkan penerbangan murah yang bermottokan "semua orang boleh terbang".

Sahabat saya ini pula bercita-cita untuk menjadi usahawan telekomunikasi berasaskan 'VoIP' yang menyediakan perkhidmatan panggilan telefon murah ke seluruh dunia melalui handphone dan talian tetap berkonsepkan 'satu kadar untuk satu dunia'. Pada hari ini perkhidmatan panggilan murah ke seluruh dunia sebegini popular di US, UK dan Eropah. Difahamkan produk VoIP sahabat saya ini lebih murah daripada yang ditawarkan oleh Skype dan ia seumpana JAJAH tapi ia lebih baik daripada itu. Produk beliau boleh berfungsi untuk semua smartphone seperti Blackberry, iPhone, Nokia, Samsung dan sebagainya. Difahamkan beliau akan melancarkan produk beliau ini dalam masa terdekat.

Saya berdoa semoga beliau berjaya dalam bidang keusahawanan dan saya hanya tumpang gembira jika beliau berjaya dalam mengharungi dunia perniagaan yang liku-likunya sentiasa berduri dan penuh ranjau. Semoga beliau sekali lagi membuat rekod dunia menjadi anak melayu pertama menyediakan perkhidmatan panggilan telefon murah dan diterima diseluruh dunia.

VOiP - Timeline

From the invention of the telephone to the VOIP we know today.

1876 - Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone.

1927 - The first transatlantic call is made over radio waves.

1958 - The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) is formed by the US government to expand America's technological frontiers, in response to the USSR's launch of Sputnik 1 the previous year.

1960s - The US telephone system gradually begins converting its internal connections to a packet-based, digital switching system.

1961 - Leonard Kleinrock at MIT publishes the first paper on packet switching theory.

1962 - JCR Licklider, of MIT, publishes a paper discussing his “Galactic Network” concept. He envisioned a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programmes from any site.

1962 - ARPA forms the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), which conducts research on command and control systems.

1965 - The first wide area computer network is built.

1967 - MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, intending to realise Licklider's idea, publishes his plan for the “Arpanet”.

1969 - The first node is connected to the Arpanet. By the end of that year, four host computers are connected.

1970 - The first packet network, AlohaNet, is developed at the University of Hawaii.

1970 - The Network Working Group (NWG) finishes the initial Arpanet host-to-host protocol, called the Network Control Protocol (NCP).

1972 - ARPA becomes DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency). It subsequently went back to ARPA on 22 February 1993, and then back to DARPA again on 11 March 1996.

1972 - Arpanet is publicly demonstrated for the first time at the International Computer Communication Conference (ICCC).

1973 - The Network Voice Protocol (NVP) is first implemented by internet researcher Danny Cohen of the Information Sciences Institute (ISI), University of Southern California, with funding from ARPA's Network Secure Communications (NSC) programme.

1973 - FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is introduced.

1973 - Arpanet makes its first international connection, while Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf team up to develop the details of the protocols that will become TCP/IP.

1973 - Bob Metcalfe at Xerox PARC develops Ethernet technology.

1973 - Dr Martin Cooper of Motorola Corporation makes what was probably the first cellular telephone call on a portable handset called the Dyna-Tac. After a successful test run, he took it to New York to introduce the technology to the public.

1973 - The experimental Network Voice Protocol is invented for the ARPANET providers.

1974 - BBN announces “Telenet”, the first public packet data service.

1977 - Fibre-optic cables are first used for telephone transmission when both GTE and AT&T laid fibre-optic lines in Chicago and Boston.

1980s - The telecommunications industry conceived that digital services would follow much the same pattern as voice services, and conceived a vision of end-to-end circuit switched services, known as the Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network (B-ISDN).

1980 - Widespread development of workstations, PCs and LANs.

1983 - The Arpanet host protocol changes from NCP to TCP/IP as of 1 January.

1984 - A standards movement is started by the International Telephone and Telegraph Consultative Committee (CCITT), now known as the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The ITU is a United Nations organisation that coordinates and standardises international telecommunications.

1984 - The National Science Foundation develops the first wide area network designed specifically to use TCP/IP.

1985 - The internet is a well-established technology supporting a wide community of researchers and developers.

1986 - The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) starts as a quarterly meeting of US government-funded researchers.

1987 - The idea for ADSL is introduced by Joe Leichleder, a Bellcore researcher.

1988 - Leichleder develops ADSL by placing wideband digital signals above the existing baseband analogue voice signal carried between telephone company central offices and customers on conventional twisted pair cabling.

1988 - Robert Morris sends a worm through the internet, affecting 6 000 of the 60 000 hosts on the network.

1989 - The first ISPs, including the first dial-up ISP world.std.com, are formed.
1989 - DSL is developed.

1990 - Arpanet is decommissioned and McGill University releases the Archie search engine.

1990 - Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, working at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), jointly propose to create a hypertext system (HTTP and HTML) accessible via browsers, which would form the basis of the World Wide Web.

1992 - The Internet Society is formed and the IETF is transferred to operate under it as an independent international standards body.

1993 - One of the first graphical web browsers, Mosaic, is released by Marc Andreessen at the US National Centre for Supercomputing Applications.

1994 - A DSL Forum is formed to help telephone companies and their suppliers realise the great market potential of ADSL.

1995 - The first internet phone software is released by Vocaltec.

1996 - POP3 (Post Office Protocol version 3) is published.

1996 - Internet phones catch the attention of US telecommunication companies, which ask the US Congress to ban the technology.

1997 - The original version of IEEE 802.11, the wireless LAN standard, is released.

1997 - 2 000th request for comments – “Internet Official Protocol Standards” – from the internet Architecture Board. The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) is established to handle administration and registration of IP numbers to the geographical areas currently handled by Network Solutions (InterNIC), starting March 1998.

1998 - Three IP switch manufacturers introduce equipment capable of switching.

1998 - French internet users give up their access on 13 December to boycott France Telecom's local phone charges (which are in addition to the ISP charge).

2005 - The one-billionth internet user goes online.

2006 - Mass-market VOIP services over broadband internet access services are popular and successful.

PSTN and VoIP

In the 1940s, a consortium of leaders in the telecommunications industry and in government standardized how customers would be assigned telephone numbers. The telephone number identified a specific pair of wires out of millions of pairs of wires, and a specific phone company switch out of thousands of such devices.

The term circuit-switched describes this setup of circuit wiring, switching devices, and telephone number assignment. The PSTN is sometimes referred to as the circuit-switched or switched network. Because today’s public phone system is still circuit switched, it still relies on the same basic system for telephone number assignment.

VoIP introduced dramatic changes in how the network is used and, over time, VoIP could force changes in how numbers are assigned. With VoIP, phone numbers are no longer tied to specific wires and switches. VoIP routes calls based on network addresses, and phone numbers are simply used because that is what people are familiar with. (VoIP takes care of translating a phone number into a network address.) In the future, as more and more people adopt VoIP-based systems, we may see dramatic changes in phone numbering.