If you ask someone what unified communications are, you’ll likely hear a broad
range of answers — from voice mail and e-mail integration to instant messaging to video
capabilities. But, according to David
Wittmann, the director of unified communications for Technology Integration Group
(TIG), unified communications is really
about application enablement.
“Using unified communications gives you
the power to enable business applications to
truly change the way your company does
business,” Wittmann says.
One example of unified communications is
the ability to have an inventory application
automatically call a vendor and let it know
that a supply of stock is low and to send new
stock. But, in order to be able to do this, says
Wittmann, different technologies need to be
able to interact, which is where standards
become important and where having a non-proprietary, open architecture is key.
Smart Business spoke with Wittmann
about unified communications, how to implement them and why they’re so beneficial.
How do you know if unified communications
are right for your business?
Many businesses have already taken advantage of the first generation of IP telephony
benefits like lower phone bills, networking
multiple sites together to work as a single
system, and having a single network for voice
and data. In order to stay ahead of the competition, companies are now looking for
ways to deliver more services to their customers and cut down on the time it takes to
make critical business decisions that will
increase the bottom line. If you are looking to
do any of these things, then you need to be
looking at putting in a solid foundation to
launch unified communications for your
business at a point in the near future that
makes sense for the organization.
What are the benefits of unified communications?
Key benefits include:
- Better collaboration internally; leveraging things like an internal audio/videoconferencing bridge versus using an expensive,
external service for this application - Better collaboration with vendors
- Better and faster communications using
features like instant messaging and integration with corporate directories - Lower cost in hardware and energy
requirements (going green) if all of the various applications can reside on less servers,
which allows a single server to support IP
telephony, IP messaging, IP conferencing, e-mail and many other business applications
What problems or issues can arise from unified communications?
Problems can and do occur because many
current vendors do not have the ability to
interoperate easily with different technologies. Until recently, telephony vendors had
closed proprietary systems that only allowed
specific phones and applications to work on
their telephony platforms. This severely limits choice for businesses that wanted to customize their business applications to work
with the telephony system. However, having
a set of standards that both the application
vendor and telephony manufacturer can
work with can help overcome this problem.
Unlike most vendors that still offer proprietary products, Cisco and 3com have built
their telephony solutions on industry standards like Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
and have designed their architecture so that
application vendors can access the IP telephony code via a Software Developers Kit
(SDK) and have the two work together.
What’s involved with implementing unified
communications?
Implementations of some of the more basic
aspects of unified communications are fairly
simple and straightforward. Things like unified messaging, audio/videoconferencing and
call centers have been around for a long time
and are well defined and developed.
Presence is something that requires SIP, and
some vendors can implement this easily if
their solution is based on the SIP standard.
If you’re looking to do true unified communications, which is really application enablement, there are a number of steps to take.
First, find out from your telephony vendor if
their solution is ‘proprietary’ or ‘standards-based.’ If it’s proprietary, then application
integration will be very challenging. If it’s
standards-based, then see if there’s an SDK. If
there is, then the voice vendor can work with
the application developer to provide a customized solution for an organization.
What are the consequences of not implementing unified communications?
If a company does not at least put in a base
telephony system that can support true unified communications in the future, it will be
less competitive and have to make a major
investment in the future once application
integration becomes the rule rather than the
exception. But, the resolutions for overcoming many of the challenges of unified communications are already in progress. Many
application designers are now building
telephony ‘hooks’ into their code that will
allow for interoperability between the telephony system and its application. Standards
like SIP are being implemented by most
major players in the telephony marketplace.
And technologies like ‘Open Source’ continue to make major gains in acceptance. <<
DAVID WITTMANN is the director of unified communications for Technology Integration Group (TIG). Reach him at (858) 566-1900 or
[email protected].
