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As business needs evolve, enterprises demand more from IP telephony. Lower cost, high-quality and reliable voice services are not enough. The need for better productivity calls for more features such as messaging with presence capabilities, conferencing, and tight integration with business applications such as order management and CRM.

While these capabilities benefit all types of enterprises, enabling them is never easy. The current IP telephony environment model requires customers to dedicate standalone servers to support each function of the telephony suite. This presents integration and system management challenges, along with the cost issues prevalent among small and medium-sized businesses, which have limited budgets and IT resources.

Making advanced IP telephony accessible to businesses of all sizes requires an all-in-one platform that delivers a complete and easy-to-manage solution. The platform must be able to deliver powerful, yet cost-efficient productivity-enhancing services and support converged business environments for enhanced collaboration among employees, customers, and business partners.

Cost-effective Convergence
The idea to transform IP telephony into an advanced enterprise application is what our VCX platform is all about. The VCX platform runs both voice and data applications on a secure network, with a common infrastructure for authentication, call control, presence, audio/video conferencing and management. Based on end-to-end session initiation protocol (SIP) signaling, the architecture facilitates seamless integration with any existing private branch exchange (PBX) infrastructure to protect the existing investments. Moreover, the VCX architecture was designed from the ground to support geographically dispersed campus and branch environments and to extend all capabilities of the IP telephony suite across the entire enterprise network.

To meet the needs of distributed enterprises, the voice boundary routing architecture was developed, a feature of the VCX platform that delivers the scalability, flexibility, and reliability needed to support all users across the enterprise. Operating in a centralized or distributed fashion, the VCX platform can scale from as few as fifty to thousands of phones. With redundancy at many levels, it guarantees availability even when individual components fail or WAN connectivity is lost.

The VCX voice boundary routing architecture deploys call processing in a hierarchical manner. Call processors and media gateways are installed at branch offices, which are then connected to the regional office call processor for redundancy, centralized routing, messaging, applications, and global directory services.

A regional office provides call processing for thousands of users or hundreds of branches, enabling connectivity to public switched telephone network (PSTN) and supporting either local or geographically dispersed redundancy. It also supports centralized applications such as messaging, conferencing, instant messaging, and presence.

Branch offices, on the other hand, can deploy cost-effective media gateways, supporting both analog and digital connectivity to the PSTN for local calls and emergency use. The call processors deployed at branch offices support specific sets of users, with individual dial plans and routing configurations, but also have redundancy to call the central site, access local and global user directories, and enable inter-regional and inter-branch dialing.

The branch office call processors are made redundant with the primary server of the regional office. If the messaging application is used at the branch offices, for instance, it automatically archives messaging data to the regional office messaging system. The VCX platform also supports remote sites connected to regional or branch offices (for call processing) that have IP phones and gateways but no call processors.

Why VCX?
One of the most obvious benefits of the VCX is that businesses now maintain a single communications infrastructure across multiple offices instead of various disparate ones. This translates to a reduced total cost of ownership as converged systems are easier to manage and modify according to business demands.

Companies can also save on long-distance costs by relying on local area networks (LANs) and wide area network (WAN) connectivity instead of PSTN. As the system is implemented throughout the organization, companies can benefit from centralized administration, configuration and management capabilities, which result in lower installation and operating costs as well as more optimized IT resources.

Additionally, because they integrate with platforms that are easy to operate and maintain, your IP solution can support all critical business applications within a single, integrated system. Platforms that embrace open standards give organizations broader choices and greater capability to leverage legacy systems, thereby eliminating additional server costs and management complexity.

Leveraging the various unified messaging tools that the VCX supports will increase business productivity by enhancing communication and collaboration among employees, customers, and partners. These may include voice mail/email/fax integration and find-me/follow-me capabilities; presence-enabled instant messaging and highly scalable audio conferencing capabilities. For service oriented businesses, VCX can also support contact center platforms for enhanced customer service and revenue generation. As the IP telephony solution is built on an open architecture and industry standards such as SIP, it provides greater flexibility to connect to third-party business applications.

It is important to note that any IP telephony solution supporting open standards gives customers greater freedom in their choice of IP handsets, media gateways and applications. Many third-party components and applications have been certified to interoperate with the VCX platform, giving customers the option to deploy best-in-class solutions and not be locked into a particular vendor's technology.

Different businesses advance at different rates. While it is true that advancements in IP telephony enable companies to implement next-generation, multimedia IP communications systems using the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) SIP standard, an organization may not need such functionality yet. By supporting features traditionally supplied by PBX systems, the VCX platform helps organizations migrate to an open, IP-based communications system at their own pace and and in support of their business objectives.

In terms of security, the VCX IP telephony solution operates on a Linux operating system with additional security measures on industry-standard enterprise-grade servers. A choice of servers is also available to provide the optimum reliability and performance characteristics based on your needs.

Adoption of IP Telephony
Many enterprises no longer have the luxury of operating disparate networks because today's economic challenges and competitive landscape make differentiation pivotal for success. While the use of converged communication solutions is clearly growing, this technology is still in its early stages. By using converged communication solutions, organizations are building the foundation for a next-generation communication world of potential value-added applications and collaboration tools.

Therefore, converged IP communication or IP telephony has gone to the next level, beyond VoIP and first-generation IP telephony. It is more than just a basic dial tone; business advantages are driven by increased productivity and enhanced communication and collaboration among employees, customers, and partners. These benefits result from cutting-edge IP-based applications. Unified messaging offers IP telephony users voice mail/email/fax integration and find-me/follow-me capabilities. Advanced collaborative applications such as instant messaging, presence, and highly scalable audio conferencing capabilities save time and effort. IP contact centers help drive customer satisfaction and business revenue. IP telephony solutions, built on open architectures and industry standards such as SIP, also provide the most flexibility to connect to the third-party applications the business requires.

These are the new methods of communications. They are what leading enterprises do to connect groups of employees, customers, and partners. Even though progress is going to be gradual, most analyst reports suggest that adoption of these applications is gaining momentum. For example, 34% of organizations that are using converged IP communication solutions have also deployed these rich collaboration tools and applications. A phenomenal 56% use audio/videoconferencing. However, surprisingly, adoption of newer applications such as converged communication clients (19%) is still modest at this time. Nevertheless, it is evident that converged IP communications and these new applications will help more and more organizations realize significant productivity benefits with these innovative applications.

Mohit Rampal
vadmail@cybermedia.co.in
The author is country manager of 3Com India