aricent cloud-based unified communications federation

Cloud-Based Unified Communications Federation

Unified Communications (UC) Federation connects productivity

services across enterprise boundaries, by establishing a

common, cloud-based platform for a wide range of collaboration

tools and services. UC Federation eliminates the need to create

complicated point-to-point UC integration projects between

companies. Point-to-point integrations are neither resilient nor

scalable, and are vulnerable to intrusion and security risks. UC

Federation allows Communications Service Providers (CSPs) to

rapidly deploy new UC revenue generating services with fast

positive ROI. Grand Research View projects the global Unified

Communication market size willreach $75.81 billion USD by

2020, growing at a CAGR of 16.3% from 2014 to 2020.1 The

report also says that North America Unified Communication

market is expected to dominate the global industry, contributing

to over 35% of the overall enterprise revenue. Enterprises can

collaborate seamlessly with external partners and suppliers

using encrypted connections for highly secure interactions.

1Cloud-Based Unified Communications Federation

Introduction to Unified Communications Federation

What is Driving Service Providers Toward Federation?

According to an IDC 2015 report, the number of marketplaces

that support business networks by connecting suppliers,

partners, and customers in a single entity will increase by 100%

through 2017. 2

Instead of utilizing multiple cumbersome proprietary

collaboration tools that have constraints and o�er limited

integration experience, UC Federation o�ers seamless

interoperability across commonly used industry UC platforms.

Enterprises are able to seamlessly connect with multiple

cross-functional teams inside and outside their companies,

across disparate UC platforms, across collaboration services

and across fixed or mobile devices leveraging the same, familiar

UC applications the end customer uses daily. UC Federation

enables services such as messaging, presence, voice, video,

directory and others. In addition, UC Federation o�ers granular

and powerful policy capability.

Vendor UC solutions only support collaboration across their

proprietary platform which enables users to exchange presence,

instant messaging, data, voice, and video calls. Enterprises not

only need to communicate within the enterprise, but they need

instant communications with their entire ecosystem of partners.

Being able to leverage presence outside the enterprise firewall is

just as valuable as inside the organization.

Service providers are faced with a wide range of challenges,

including:

The need to integrate information across IT, telephony, and

mobile devices has led more and more enterprises to implement

UC. Enterprises require user presence information to be

reflected across fixed, mobile, and IP networks so that users are

contacted at appropriate times. Presence federation becomes

challenging when service providers try to integrate proprietary

vendor solutions across multiple devices. Enterprise UCC

solutions based on familiar technologies, such as telephony,

messaging and conferencing, are being supplemented by

rapidly developing communications architectures, platforms

and applications based on fast-moving networking technologies

Presence Integration Across PSTN/PLMN/ IP Networks

such as presence, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), unified

communications as a service (UCaaS), rich mobility solutions

and Web real-time communications (WebRTC). These will

facilitate deeper use of UC as an aid to improving individual

employee and corporate productivity, facilitating and

augmenting business processes. The availability of diverse

enterprise systems (Skype For Business, IBM Sametime, Google

Apps and Cisco Jabber) and public systems (Google Hangout,

Yahoo) poses a challenge for information exchange between

systems and creates the need for an integrated environment.3


Because UC platforms support voice and video calls, users are

now able to escalate their chat sessions to voice or video

through the click of a button. Peer-to-peer and multi-party

voice and video calls, and ad hoc conferences across enterprise

boundaries, adds a new dimension to communication across

diverse and disparate UC platforms.

In addition to presence, enterprises are looking for exchange of

data between multiple UC vendor platforms, both public and

enterprise. Users should be able to easily exchange documents,

images, and videos across platforms subject to security and

data model preferences. Also, enterprises need interoperable

platforms that can seamlessly integrate with their current and

future IT infrastructure, thereby minimizing the risk of platform

dependency. Currently, many enterprise UC solutions use

proprietary protocols, which makes the UC system very rigid.

Enterprises are demanding protocol convergence across

di�erent proprietary standards. Service providers will need to

start selling systems based on open standards like Session

Initiation Protocol (SIP), Simple Object Access Protocol

(SOAP), Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP),

and SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging

Extensions (SIMPLE) to serve a wide range of buyers.

Voice Video, and Data Across UC Platforms

To create an approachable, collaborative, and productive

environment, enterprises are looking for a federation solution

that can facilitate Enterprise Address Book and Calendar

sharing with federated partner enterprises based on their

outbound information sharing policies. Enterprise Address

Book sharing allows users to quickly and easily search for and

connect with partners. Calendar sharing plays an important

role in reducing delays in communications and decision making

by checking the availability of stakeholders across enterprises

before sending meeting invitations with defined agendas.

Address Book, Calendar Sharing Across Enterprises

With partners becoming a part of the enterprise

communication network, the need for secure policy control

increases. Policy control enables users to seamlessly exchange

relevant data across other users by monitoring the policies tied

up with corresponding users. The policy control preferences

define a particular user’s ability to view the presence of other

users, set up voice calls, and exchange instant messages,

documents, images, and videos across platforms. Enterprises

need to evolve their data model to protect confidentiality of

information being exchanged by imposing corresponding policy

control rules. Further, a need to audit information exchange is

imperative. The ability to monitor information exchange based

on properties, file type, file size, context, key words, and other

criteria is covered at a later part in this document.

Policy Information Security, and Audit

Currently, enterprises are creating mesh

point-to-point networks with partner enterprises

which have high financial and operational costs.

Managing, and maintaining these mesh networks

is costly, and often out of service due to a router or

network configuration change which did not

consider the mesh. Enterprises intend to leverage

a single federated solution which provides a single

interface to all federated partner enterprises.

Centralized Federation

Cloud-Based Unified Communications Federation 3

Centralized federation solutions give service providers call control, presence and data exchange, policy management options, and much

more. The solution also enables users to connect across multiple devices by publishing the relevant information to these devices.

Federation can enable users across multiple enterprise

platforms to share presence information with other users.

Presence services not only share standard presence states like

“available,” “busy,” and “do not disturb,” but let users add

custom status messages to share with federated colleagues.

The federated presence capabilities across multiple platforms

collect detailed information on users and report the presence

statuses to others across di�erent enterprises. Advance

presence federation enables e�cient sharing of location

information of enterprise users.

Federation also enables peer-to-peer and ad hoc chat sessions

across enterprise boundaries.

Inter-Enterprise PresenceAnd IM Federation

3rd-Party Web Apps

UC Federation

ES RS

REST

Media

Signaling

Media

Signaling

InternetIntra/

Internet

Application Enablement

PBX

Public TelecomNetwork

Centralized UC Federation

IBM Sametime

Google Hangout

Cisco Jabber

Microsoft Skype for Business

Presence/1:1 IM/Multi-party IMVoice/Video/File Transfer


Presence Across PLMN/PSTN, IP and IMS Networks

Access Levels

A federated UC solution enables tight integration of presence

not only with the diverse UC platform, but onto users’ fixed,

mobile, or IP networks. It also reflects each user’s presence

across the multiple modes of communications.

For example, when Bob wants to talk to Denis, he checks

Denis’s unified presence information via his UC client, or on his

IP phone. Knowing Denis’s presence increases Bob’s chances

of reaching him directly, as opposed to not knowing Denis’s

availability and thus being less likely to make a successful call.

Access levels provide a flexible authorization model for

enterprises/ users to control the amount of presence informa-

tion that others see. For example, if a user wants to always be

available to a group of selected federated users even when busy

or in a meeting, the user can assign those users to the Team

access level. In short, the user may choose to be accessible to a

select group or specific users.

Hub and Spoke Model

Centralized federation is represented by a Hub-and-Spoke

model, wherein UC Federation is the hub and the supported UC

platforms are the spokes. This solution leverages reduced

enterprise IT infrastructure requirements in order to federate

with partners. It is simpler to integrate enterprise and public UC

platforms with federation solutions that require minimal

maintenance, thus reducing financial and operational costs for

the enterprises.

Centralized Policy Management

Policy control plays an integral part in any enterprise, enabling

e�cient and e�ective configuration of user preferences and

capabilities. Service providers can configure policy control

settings at enterprise level or at a centralized location.

Centralized policy control enables enterprises to configure

settings in one place and then apply them across multiple

locations and departments. Federation delivers policy

management capabilities for enterprises through configurable

data models to define rules on how users from one enterprise

should be connected to users from another enterprise, and the

presence of each in terms of viz, instant message sharing, voice

and video call setup, data sharing, etc.

Web PortalProvisioning

WirelessNetwork

IMS (SIP)

ApplicationEnablement

Enterprise #1 Enterprise #2

Private Network

Private Network

DMZ DMZ

DMZ

XMPP

XMPP(TLS Optional)

SIP/SIMPLE

SMS/MMS3rd Party

ApplicationsUC Federation

Firewall/Reverse Proxy/TLS Proxy

Provisioning/Real-Time Charging/Call Control

Access Edge

Lync

MOCs

Gateway

GtalkClients

GtalkServer


Policy Management - Use Case

A user belongs to an enterprise, which is segmented into

contact groups. Contact groups are defined hierarchically (i.e.,

sub-contact group belongs to parent contact group).

In the following example, the enterprise is defined as contact

group 1, containing all employees. The two sub-contact groups 2

and 3 are defined as Marketing and Support departments.

User A inherits from the default enterprise policies (contact

group 1)

User B inherits from the Marketing dept. policies (contact group

2), which overrides the default enterprise (contact group 1)

policies

User C inherits both the Marketing dept. and Support dept.

policies (the union of contact groups 2 and 3), which override

the policies of the default enterprise (contact group 1)

Hub and Spoke Model

Company 5Company 6

UC

UC

UCUC

UC

UC

Company 1

Company 2 Company 3

Company 4

Company 5

Contact Group = Enterprise

Contact Group 2 = Marketing Department

Contact Group 3 = Support Department

Company 6

Company 1

Company 2 Company 3

Company 4

UC Federation

A

C

B

Enterprise

Contact Group 2 Contact Group 3Contact A

Contact B Contact C Contact D

Enterprise Contact defined at Group Level (* Company.com )

Contact Group 2, Group 3, defined at Group Level(* Sales company.com ) (* hr company.com )

Additional contacts defined at individual level([email protected])

Enterprise Policy Modelling

Contact Group 1

Automatic Sensing of Activities

With the enhanced presence model, users’ activities across

devices are automatically collected and aggregated into a

presence status selected on behalf of the user. No user input is

required. For example, a user’s presence status is set to “on a

call” when that user places or receives a call on a landline or

mobile phone (assuming these devices are defined in the user’s

contacts) or to “in a meeting.” As a user signs in to O�ce

Communicator, attends meetings, places or answers phone

calls, or simply stops interacting via phone or computer, the

presence system continues to gather information about the

user’s status and then distributes the information to others.

The format needs work. The text and pictures are not aligned.

Why have 12 words after the picture? Move to paragraph above

picture.

Voice and Video Federation

Federation allows and manages policies for voice/video chat

and conferencing. Enterprise users can connect to peers in

another enterprise via their UC platform and perform two-party

communication or multi-party communication. These calls

involve signalling session and media session, on top of the

signalling session. UC Federation Policy management monitors

and enables such calls based on enterprise policies and rules

while media is shared directly between the enterprise users

(point-to-point).


The federation capabilities are allowed or denied based on the policies defined by federating enterprises in UC Federation solution. Examples:


Video over IP

MicrosoftSkype For Business, Lync

Enterprise #1

Video over IP

Enterprise #2

Policies are defined at Various Levels

Restrict sending/receiving file transfer capabilities of enterprise

users: Policies defined in Policy Manager to enable sending/

receiving of files by the enterprise users

Allow/restrict of files transfers of defined file type: Policies

defined in Policy Manager to inspect file properties viz and file

name, title, size, type, copyright, etc.

– Allow/restrict of files sharing based on file name, title, and

copyrights

– Allow sharing files with extensions DOC, DOCX, PDF, etc.,

while restricting the sharing of Image files with extensions IMG

and BMP; Music files with extensions MP3 and MP4; Code files

with extensions CXX, C, and PL by users across enterprise

boundaries

– Allow/restrict file sharing with defined size limits: Polices

defined to inspect the file size limits (e.g., file size of more than 1

GB is not allowed to be transferred across Enterprise bounda-

ries)

Allow/restrict file transfers after content monitoring: Rules

defined in Policy Manager to inspect the file content in order to

determine if it contains sensitive information of any kind (e.g.,

intellectual property, consumer data, etc.). Once it is

determined that the file contains sensitive information, proper

security action is enforced (block file transfer or warn the user

that the action is illegitimate)

UC Federation exposes APIs to interface with 3rd-party

Content Inspection and Monitoring solutions

– To provide a powerful combined solution for secure data

transfer

– Easily integrate into the existing enterprise IT infrastructure

having a Content Inspection and Monitoring solution

Whenever a policy breach is determined, a trace log is created

for the enterprise administrator to track the policy infringement

at enterprise.

Unified Communications Federation enables users to transfer

files by simply dragging and dropping them into a chat session.

File transfers can be attained by embedding the files as MIME

objects inside the stream of instant messages with MSRP

protocol. Also, secure MIME (S/MIME) can be used for ensuring

the integrity and confidentiality of the transferred content.

Legitimate file transfers allow receiving users to decide whether

to download a file based on information shared about the file.



File Transfer over IP

MicrosoftSkype For Business, Lync

Enterprise #1

File Transfer over IP

Enterprise #2

The federation of presence, instant messaging, data, voice, and

video between two enterprises improved productivity through

e�cient information exchange resulting in improved

communications and accelerated deliverables. As the UC

market matures, federation will become critical to maintaining

seamless communication across enterprises. A federated

environment delivers a simplified architecture that can enable

users to overcome many of the inherent drawbacks and

challenges to day-to-day communication. Our UC Federation

solution will help an enterprise implement the simplest UC

integration strategy and improve secure productivity without

significant operational overhead.

Federation helps enterprises create collaborative environments

that improve productivity and accelerate decision making.

Whilst the centralized federation solution also helps enterprises

reduce financial and operational costs by leveraging the

centralized policy and eliminating costly point-to-point network

builds.

Federation delivers a framework that gives rise to a “world

without boundaries” where enterprises and users interact with

multiple vendors across networks and platforms.

Aricent UC Federation is a centralized application which

interconnects UC systems, including industry leaders such as

Microsoft Lync/Skype for Business, Cisco Jabber, IBM

Sametime, Broadsoft Broadworks, as well as public UC and even

IMS/RCS networks. The UC Federation is part of our Business

Communications Services portfolio. It includes applications for

corporate users, including a VPN / VPBX, a contact centre, a call

routing system, a toll-free service, a UC federation service and a

gateway to interact with Social Networks. UC Fed also provides a

unified set of interfaces for OSS/BSS integration, as well as

open APIs for third-party developments and end-user clients.


Summary

REFERENCES

-

1. https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2015/09/25/770978/10150609/en/

Unified-Communication-Market-Size-Will-Be-Worth-75-81-Billion-By-2020-

Grand-View-Research-Inc.html

2. Mobile unified communications: an unexplored opportunity

3. Gartner-Magic-Quadrant-for-Unified-Communications-as-a-Service-Worldwide

Trademarks

Google Hangout is a trademark of Google.

IBM Same Time is a trademark of IBM.

Cisco Jabber is a trademark of Cisco.

Microsoft Skype for Business are trademarks of Microsoft.

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