Communications architecture not meeting the requirements of organizations

New Delhi

April 30, 2008

Butler Group, in its recent report said that organizations are moving from
traditional hierarchies based on command and control, to looser structures
utilizing collaboration and teamwork and there is a fundamental shift from
one-to-one to many-to-many communication.

The report 'Communications and Collaboration Report — Laying the
Foundations for Business Process Flexibility' identifies that organizations
are beginning to expand outside the traditional boundaries found in the past.
The extended enterprise now requires a common IP-based infrastructure to
capitalize on information mobility and the need to be more flexible. There is a
requirement for greater location independence, with remote working becoming more
popular and many employees no longer remaining in one place for any great length
of time. In order for this flexibility and changes in work practices to be
catered to, it is becoming apparent that the existing separate siloed
infrastructures are no longer the answer.

“The need for new and enhanced service provision to support business
requirements must drive infrastructure and technology deployment. A
services-based approach is best suited to this environment to insulate
developers and users from the complexity of the infrastructure, and to ease the
integration of the different systems and communication mechanisms. There should
be a move towards the provision of common integrated communication services,
which are ideal for catering for a complex and distributed environment. Web
services can also be utilized to mobilize information to all stakeholders,”
said Mark Blowers, Director-Enterprise Architectures Practice and co-author of
the study.

“Moving away from proprietary solutions for voice and data to a horizontal
communications architecture will enable the communications environment to be
broken down into separate layers, making use of industry standards to integrate
the hardware, common services, and administration elements. This
componentization and services-based approach increases flexibility, enabling
services to be developed independent of the equipment. Using IP-based components
instead of vendor-dependent solutions improves scalability, along with driving
down infrastructure costs with price/performance optimization,” said Blowers.

Communications convergence

The term 'convergence' can be misleading. It is not a merger of voice
and data networks, but the utilization of the existing data, fixed, and wireless
infrastructure for the provision of IP-based services, including voice, data,
video, and storage. Within this all-encompassing environment, one of the most
important building blocks is the establishment of voice as an application. This
fundamentally alters the communications paradigm, enabling the development and
integration of many new innovative services.

The reach and range of business processes continues to increase as
organizations extend and expand their interactions with partners, suppliers, and
customers; and so the need to integrate geographically dispersed teams into
complex business processes presents something of a challenge for the IT manager.
Fax, e-mail, pager, SMS, web conferencing, video conferencing, and conventional
teleconferencing are all in use today, yet many business processes are still
hampered by ineffective collaboration. Organizations must therefore re-examine
their corporate communication and collaboration strategies in order to better
support business activities and objectives.

“Communications play an important role in ensuring businesses function
efficiently. It is therefore vital for systems to be effective and easy to use.
Enterprises are concerned with both employee and customer satisfaction when
deploying communication technologies and are looking to improve productivity
through their IP and unified communications investments,” added Blowers.

“There is pressure on the IT manager to provide enterprise presence
functionality due to the availability of consumer instant messaging. Social
networking techniques and Web 2.0 functionality used in the consumer environment
will be demanded by the enterprise workforce, which will come to expect these
new tools and technologies to be readily available at any location, as well as
being able to use any device,” said Blowers.

Important considerations

Although reliability and security are amongst the most important factors in
investment decisions, the cost of implementation is the leading inhibitor.
Whilst this is slightly more of a factor for small or medium-sized enterprises
with tighter IT budgets, it is still an issue for a majority of the enterprises
responding to a 2007 Datamonitor survey on Communications Convergence.

Another challenge is securing the extended environment that most IT managers
now need to support. There are many instances of successful attacks and loss of
data, which includes finance companies and government agencies. The issue of
security must be adequately addressed when contemplating utilizing an IP-based
environment. Whilst the introduction of voice and video on to the network
presents new security worries, it does not, however, add any new vulnerability
that did not previously exist.

Effective management is a key capability in the unified environment where
policies must drive availability, and visibility moves from individual point
solutions to being system wide, along with the shift from fixed asset
administration to dynamic asset utilization. A cornerstone for the provision of
multi-modal channels is the ability to deliver intelligent central performance
management, enabling efficient use of the available resources. The accessibility
of end-to-end quality of service (QoS) supporting data, voice, and multimedia,
is an important first step in the evolution towards an automated solution.

“Many communication and collaboration strategies are primarily initiated to
reap the benefits of infrastructure consolidation, such as reductions in
operational costs, and to improve levels of service quality. However, although
these are useful goals, the real value afforded by unified communications and
collaboration solutions ultimately arises from improvements to business
processes, enhancement of stakeholder interactions, the optimization of
workflow, and driving innovation in the business,” concluded Browers.