Voice plus data equals innovation

The once vastly separate worlds of corporate data and telephony have collided. IP-based enterprise phone systems are invading corporate branch offices, telecommuter home offices, and call centers everywhere. Sooner or later, voice will be just another digital packet on the IP network, and telephony will be just another managed application about which IT must worry.

But enterprisewide VoIP won’t happen right away, mainly because the chief benefit of VoIP -- the cost savings of two infrastructures becoming one -- makes little sense when it requires a network upgrade, and the legacy phone system works perfectly well.

Instead, the real excitement is swirling around converged voice and data applications. “Now that the products have matured and the early phases of simply delivering IP telephony are behind us, we’re going to really see the promise of applications surrounding VoIP,” says Kevin Johnson, director of product marketing at Mitel.

The most obvious angle is enterprise collaboration, where voice and data applications combine IM, presence, Web, and videoconferencing. But voice is wending its way into corporate applications as well. ERP, for example, is gaining IP telephony capabilities to speed approvals and to relieve bottlenecks in business processes and workflows. Today’s closest thing to a killer app, however, is the IP-based multimedia call center, which merges all customer communications -- including Web, e-mail, chat, and voice -- to enhance the customer-support experience and to allow the distribution of call-center staff across the country or even the world.

Just as voice is redefining enterprise applications, IP capabilities are changing the phone on the desktop. An IP phone can now serve as a combined communications and data-access appliance, particularly in departments that don’t need a computer on every desk.

The magic of presence

Such innovations are practical only when phone and data systems are one. “You could [in the past] link traditional telephony systems with corporate data and applications, but it was expensive and required a lot of complicated connections and translation,” says Alex Hadden-Boyd, director of IP communications and marketing at Cisco Systems. With voice running across the IP LAN, it becomes relatively easy to pull these functions apart -- so they can be provided by different systems or services --and to mix and merge VoIP apps with other apps running over IP. Many of today’s converged solutions are provided wholly by the IP phone system vendors, but standards that foster open convergence approaches are taking hold. One of the big convergence enablers is the IETF’s SIP.

Most IP phone systems started life based on the H.323 set of standards released by the International Telecommunications Union. Because SIP came out of the IETF, it’s much more oriented toward PCs, PC-like devices, and the Internet. VoIP vendors have used SIP to merge presence, IM, voice, Web, and videoconferencing into real-time communications applications tied to an IP PBX. Some vendors force you to stick with their VoIP and IM solutions in order to get all these merged capabilities, but that’s starting to change. For example, Siemens layers its OpenScape server on top of Microsoft’s LCS (Live Communications Server) and Windows 2003 so you don’t have to abandon an existing LCS implementation; OpenScape can also work with an IP PBX from another vendor such as Cisco. And with other vendors’ solutions working with popular IM clients, the writing seems to be on the wall for eventual interoperability.