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Key Points

• Unified communications is

designed to help your employees communicate moreeffectively with customers andone another.

• UC encompasses manydifferent areas, includingtelephony, messaging, andvideoconferencing, each of which may be deployed andintegrated with your network asappropriate.

• As you construct your UCsystem, you must make surethe network plumbingsupporting it is secure andreliable.

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General Information

February 26, 2010 • Vol.32 Issue 5 

Page(s) 28 in print issue

Simplifying UnifiedCommunicationsExperts Weigh In On How Best To Streamline Your Communications

Perhaps the most puzzling thing aboutunified communications, or UC for short, is that there seems to be a lackof consensus over what it means.

“There are so many definitions andinterpretations. Some people say UCwhen they mean unified messaging.Some equate UC with just email, justinstant messaging,” says Scott Gode,vice president of product management

and marketing at managed UC communications provider Azaleos (www.azaleos.com).

According to Gode, many people that he has encounteredseem to believe that there is a direct association between UCand VoIP telephony, which leads to the mistaken belief that inorder to implement a UC system, IT must scrub out or exchange an enterprise’s current PBX-based telephonysystem and start from scratch with a VoIP one. As a result,

many SMEs believe the perceived costs—as well as thefuture political and organizational ramifications—of makingsuch a migration will be so enormous that the process isstillborn.

So if you’re thinking about deploying some sort of UC system in your data center, you’re in luckbecause you can take one of many different paths. “You can start by just doing instant messaging,some form of Web conferencing, or some telephony, but you don’t have to do everything all atonce. You can do it in a piecemeal fashion because it’s more cost-effective and less destabilizingfrom an internal IT perspective,” Gode says.

The Meaning Of UC 

Tristan Barnum, director of Switchvox product marketing at open-source VoIP and UC provider Digium (www.digium.com), says that when she thinks about UC as a concept, it means the abilityto get the information that you need in the context that you need it. “In an ideal world, I am notgetting phone calls at my desk when I am clearly in a conference room,” Barnum says. “I haveprograms running that know where I am [and] what appointments I have scheduled so that callsshould come to my cell phone.”

Barnum cites several permutations of this basic concept. For example, when she gets a call at her desk, the ideal UC system will give her passive information about the person calling, such as anyunread emails or upcoming appointments. It will Google this person to gather more information andperhaps pull up his or her record in Salesforce.com. “I shouldn’t have to be clicking all over theplace to find this information. It should come to me in the place where I am,” she says.

In other words, UC encompasses everything that can help you communicate with others moreeffectively. “It makes my workflow a lot more streamlined. I seem to have it a lot better together 

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than people, who, when you call, say, ‘Who are you again? Can I get your order number? Can Ilook you up in the customer database?’ It’s not like that when you call a company that has UCdeployed appropriately,” Barnum says.

Start Small 

Unlike most IT initiatives that call for a master strategy before deployment, starting small andadding on makes the most sense for SMEs. “There are several ways you can tiptoe into a UCsolution,” says Gode. For example, the modular strategy of gradually adding on helps companiesavoid accidentally doubling up on a certain technology, such as not discontinuing a PBX systemonce the VoIP solution is in place. “These companies still have traditional phones on their desksinstead of softphones,” he says.

Barnum suggests choosing a central building block from which to build out your system. “Often it’ssomething that has an IP PBX component because you can branch off from there to conferencingservers, faxing, and chat,” she says. “Most companies already have an email server like Exchangeor something else that they are managing themselves, and if your solution supports enough openstandards, you can hook it up to your email, and suddenly you’ve added a lot of functionality.”

The Right Network Plumbing 

You can have the most feature-rich UC system in the world, but if you don’t have it interactingwith your voice and video data in a secure and reliable fashion, your users are not going to behappy, says Dave Martin, vice president of marketing at VoIP and networking services provider Edgewater Networks (www.edgewaternetworks.com).

“Your system needs to be able to prioritize real-time voice and video traffic over conventional data

traffic so that your users get the same quality of service they have come to expect,” says Martin.

In addition, you need to have voice-aware firewalls that work properly when you run your UCsystem through them, and your security setup and your public and private address space mustalso support these applications and protocols from an IP perspective, says Martin. “The networkingplumbing stuff is not glamorous to a lot of people, but you have to have a stable base in order tosimplify the user experience,” he says.

by Robyn Weisman 

Best Tips For Beginners 

Start small. “Don’t try to boil the UC ocean with your initial implementation,” saysScott Gode, vice president of product management and marketing at Azaleos(www.azaleos.com). “Search for UC expertise to help you take stock of operations. You may be very knowledgeable about IT but not necessarily abouttelephony and other new facets of UC,” he says.

Avoid vendor lock-in. Consider a solution that supports open standards. “If youdon’t like the chat component offered by the same company you get your [telephony solution] from, you want to be able to add a third-party chat servicedown the road,” says Tristan Barnum, director of Switchvox product marketing atDigium (www.digium.com). “You don’t want to get locked into a ‘too bad’situation,” she says.

Copyright © 2010 Sandhills Publishing Company U.S.A. All rights reserved.