How to prepare for IP-based applications
By Howard Baldwin
Anyone who has been in IT for more than 10 years remembers the horrific days of what used to be known as computer-telephony integration. Integrating standard operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows, with proprietary telephony platforms almost always required highly skilled (and highly expensive) technicians.
Times, thankfully, have changed with the arrival of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).
In Summary:
| • | Conduct a network assessment to determine bandwidth capabilities for both current and future applications. |
| • | Consider the challenges of incrementally adopting IP telephony. |
| • | Explore the implications of converged applications on storage needs, network capacity, and integration with other applications. |
Now that vendors have figured out how to convert voice files into data packets and to rewrite software for call routing and switching to run on standard PC servers, we are entering the age of unified communications. This means new applications and capabilities delivered by IP telephony, which promise more efficiency for employees and cost savings for companies.
For example, Microsoft plans an extensive deployment of applications that take advantage of unified communications, including:
Unified communications brings numerous benefits to IT, but also some challenges. Among the benefits, IT has to manage only one network, which means freeing up precious IT staff for other tasks. (For more on the business benefits, see this companion article
The challenges include requiring you to understand the impact of unified communications capabilities on your network capacity and your storage needs, and where they should integrate with your current applications.
Take a hard look at your bandwidth capacity
Your network is the foundation for unified communications, and as such, you need to assess whether it has the bandwidth to handle both voice and data. It is important to remember that latency — the gap between the departure and arrival of a bit — is more noticeable in a voice conversation than in e-mail.
A network assessment requires calculating how much bandwidth you currently have, how much bandwidth you think voice conversations require (you will need at least twice as much bandwidth for voice as for data), and then tallying how much more network capacity you will need to support a converged voice and data network. "Look at the switches to see how much bandwidth they can handle," recommends Mike Minnich, chief executive of NetGain, a telephony VAR based in DeGraff, Ohio. "Then look at how you should segment the traffic most efficiently."
It is also a good idea to consider other potential uses, such as videoconferencing. That way, you will not have to upgrade your network a second time.
Be sure to set up the network so that voice traffic gets priority over data traffic. If you are using a hosted service, ensure that your quality-of-service agreement indicates how the provider will prioritize voice traffic to avoid delays (also known as latency). "If you can't prioritize the traffic, then you can't guarantee that the applications will act the way they should," says Lance Reid, CEO of NetLogic Solutions Inc., a consulting firm based in Turlock, Calif., focusing on converged solutions for midsize businesses.
Implications for deploying IP-based applications
Here are four issues to address before implementing an IP infrastructure.
1. Your ability to run two phone networks concurrently. One of the advantages of IP-based telephony is that you can easily integrate an IP-based PBX with a PBX using traditional technology (known as TDM, for time-division multiplex). This is useful if your company is expanding, because you can deploy converged communications without throwing out everything you already have and replacing it with a new network.
Even though users on the TDM network will not be able to take advantage of some of the unified communication features available to those on the IP network, this integration capability will allow your company to ramp up slowly to IP telephony. There is no easy way to compare the costs, because running two networks increases your IT support costs, while upgrading simultaneously increases your infrastructure costs, according to Scott Gass, senior principal consultant for INS, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based network reseller and consultancy.
2. Storage considerations. Keep in mind that the corollary to any successful technology deployment is that people will invariably request more features over time. In this case, if you deploy unified messaging, employees will receive and forward more data overall, given the inclusion of voice mail and faxes as e-mail messages. Those messages will in turn need to run over your network and be archived. As a result, you should consider revising your IT policies to account for how much data each user can store and for how long. You likely will have to invest in more storage capacity.
3. IP applications will need to share data with other applications. The most likely candidates for integration with other systems are "click-to-talk" or "click-to-chat" applications on your Web site that allow customers to ask questions while browsing; these will integrate with your Web server software. During these conversations, your customer service agents will want to know about that customer's history with your company. That will require integration with any customer databases or CRM applications you have.
4. Compliance and recordkeeping requirements. Finally, think about your company's requirements regarding compliance and record keeping. Employee communications represent electronic records, so you will need to integrate them with an archiving or data management application. When researching new IP-based applications, make sure they include XML links that make integration and data communication easier.
For all its challenges, deploying unified communications represents a rare opportunity for IT departments. It will enable your staff to tackle new technologies that are likely to be the backbone of network communications for years to come, and as such it's a good learning opportunity. Unified communications also offers a chance to create a solid network infrastructure on which your midsize company can grow — and that is the best kind of contribution an IT department can make.
Howard Baldwin is a Sunnyvale, California-based contributing writer to the Microsoft Midsize Business Center. His work has appeared in CIO, Optimize and InfoWorld.
