IT Roadmap

Collaboration is the New Normal for Business

Dynamic collaboration across enterprise and inter-enterprise boundaries represents "the new normal." Organizations are now challenged to work closely with suppliers, partners and contractors to deliver their offerings in today's high velocity markets.

"Web 2.0 tools such as video portals, podcasts, blogs, wikis, and discussion forums are changing the way in which information is created, published, managed, and consumed," according to a recent report from Cisco. "Technology advances and the need to work outside of normal business hours and locations fosters an increasingly mobile and distributed workforce. A flood of new devices and applications is entering the corporate IT environment as employees elect to merge consumer-based tools with standardized communications."

As organizations grapple with global value chains, information overload, and more mobile workforces, they are challenged to embrace and integrate new collaboration capabilities.

"As the number of intra- and intercompany stakeholders increases, the number of collaborative tools and communication formats increases," states the report. "In other words, the scope of collaboration must be broadened. It must combine document- and text-centric collaboration — such as email messaging, instant messaging (IM), team workspaces, and conferencing — with voice, video, and context to fully support the needs of the business."

Cisco contends that enterprises will need to recognize several key principles as they implement collaboration technology and infrastructure in the coming years. Among them:

• An interoperable, open architecture: As collaboration increasingly occurs across organizations and with people on the move, it is no longer a given that IT can control the devices and applications used in collaborative sessions. Today’s environment requires an interoperable, open architecture that allows for any device or application to use a core set of collaborative services.


• Secure inter-company collaboration: Organizations will increasingly move from collaboration within functions to intra-company collaboration to inter-company collaboration. In this environment, securely enabling collaboration with partners, suppliers, and customers as if they were behind the firewall is fundamental.


• Flexible deployment models: IT requires the flexibility to adjust to a dynamically changing business and technology environment. Enterprise and IT architects do not make decisions in the context of on-premises versus on-demand, but seek to couple the robustness, security, and performance of the enterprise network with the openness and flexibility of collaboration through the cloud.

Strategic planners in IT need to ensure they construct a core foundation that supports a rapidly evolving set of applications — one that also optimizes the various media types that comprise today’s collaborative experience. They'll need an open architecture that secures collaboration and supports multiple approaches to deployment.

Is Your Network Ready to Enable the Virtual Office?

Teleworking is on the rise, creating new challenges and opportunities for enterprises committed to the promise of borderless networks.

Consider a few projections and estimates:

• Number of teleworkers by 2011: 112 million
• Percentage of employees that work outside the corporate HQ: 90%
• Average amount saved per year on fuel by employees who work one day at home: $500
• Average commercial real estate savings per year for a full time teleworker: $22,000 

Considering the challenges of the current down economy and the clear savings associated with telework, it seems likely that teleworking will become an attractive approach for more and more organizations in the coming years. It’s certainly attractive to workers seeking schedule flexibility and better work-life balance.  They want to save time and costs on commuting.

While there may have been concerns in the past about the ability of teleworkers to build trust with their colleagues and effectively collaborate, the maturing of technology over the years has addressed many of these concerns. Rich communication and collaboration capabilities – matched with convenience and cost savings – have dramatically shifted the equation in favor of telework.

The question is: What will it take to successfully implement, manage and secure robust networks and IT resources that will support the move to a virtual office environment?

 

One thing that’s clear is that teleworkers, full- and part-time home office workers, mobile contractors, and executives will expect the same rich array of network services – including data, voice, video and various applications – they could expect to access at a corporate office. 

But that won’t be enough. New telework solutions must also meet the requirements of IT. They must simplify the process of providing rich network services to remote locations.  Deployment and integration must be simple as well, making it easy to scale with the demands of the enterprise. Moreover, security must be uncompromising, ensuring traffic controls and identity management can be strictly enforced.

Finally, it’s critical to ensure the business objectives of the organization are addressed. Solutions must drive measurable productivity gains and cost reductions while facilitating greater agility.

Telework has been called a “quiet revolution,” but it’s clear it won’t remain quiet much longer.

Improve Customer Interactions with UC Plus Virtualization

Customers demand easy access to information—through self-service Web portals as well as from customer service representatives. Customer-focused organizations can improve customer interactions dramatically by integrating communications systems with customer information.  

Data center virtualization, in combination with unified communications systems, improves customer interactions, provides customer service agents with real-time access to up-to-date customer data, offers intuitive self-service options, and protects availability and security of valuable customer information.

Data center virtualization is the unified “back-end” for a Unified Communications platform. Virtualized data centers offer ubiquitous, always on access to critical customer information. The seamless integration of applications and data services within a virtualized IT infrastructure enhances any customer service or call center operation.

Take a look at 4 Advantages:

• Always On: Virtualized application services assure that customer service applications are always available to self-service customers or customer service agents. There is no need for expensive redundant data centers or failover operations, since the virtualized infrastructure is inherently redundant.


• Up-to-Date: Virtualized data services assure that customer information is always up-to-date and in sync regardless of access methods (e.g., web or CRM) or application instance.  Customers and service agents enjoy real-time customer information from any access point.


• Ubiquitous response:  Whether a customer is signing in from New Delhi or New York, virtualization enables them to be routed to the most efficient resource to meet their information needs.  Call-center agents are also routed to the most efficient processor within the virtualized infrastructure assuring optimum performance and response times regardless of locale or current application/information workloads.


• Reduced Cost: The cost of providing customer information application services is dramatically reduced, thanks to a reduction in CapEx and OpEx  costs  associated with the procurement, appointment and ongoing management of a virtualized IT infrastructure.

When combined with a Unified Communications platform, data center virtualization empowers customer call centers or self-service customer applications to deliver the information needed quickly, reliably and in real time, wherever it’s required.

Unified Communications Generates Rapid Returns

Did you know that enterprises are realizing 40-50% savings on their investments in Unified Communications as they lay the foundations for advanced collaboration?

Here’s how.  When they migrate from traditional time-division multiplexing (TDM) to new Unified Communications platforms, they are embracing a number of capabilities that deliver accelerated ROI.  According to Cisco, there are five core capabilities delivering these impressive gains. They include:

• Full IP telephony deployment: You can achieve TCO savings of 15 to 25 percent by moving site-to-site voice traffic from the costly public switched telephone network (PSTN) to the internal data network (toll bypass). The savings stem from lower operating costs, toll bypass, and the introduction of least-cost routing.


• SIP trunking: Additional TCO savings of up to 12 to 26 percent are enabled by lowering local voice connectivity costs—achieved by eliminating multiple dedicated voice lines in favor of provisioning approximately 80-percent fewer SIP voice channels to handle the concurrent sessions. The high end of the savings range can be realized for very distributed companies such as retailers, retail banks, and other companies with multiple branch-office locations.


• Intercompany media routing: This capability can drive incremental 5- to 10-percent TCO savings by routing business-to-business calls – including rich media collaboration -- over the Internet in a secure, high quality fashion.


• Session management: Enterprises can realize an additional 4- to 8- percent TCO reduction through centralized routing and VOIP management. For a relatively low initial investment, enterprises can capture savings from existing telephony assets and achieve a rapid ROI. When combined with migration to full unified communications, session management solutions deliver even greater savings.


• Mobility:  New mobility capabilities tied to Unified Communication solutions can save enterprises 13 to 20 percent on rapidly rising mobile costs. These solutions reduce airtime charges, lower roaming costs with single number reach, and enable easier dialing and lower costs for international calls.

Given the challenging demands associated with today’s economy, enterprises of all kinds are under pressure to drive out costs and drive up efficiencies. They also are seeking ways to enable collaboration that will enhance agility and deliver a competitive advantage. What’s clear is that these gains are now within reach. To learn more about how Cisco is delivering on this promise, download this white paper.

IP Telephony is More Reliable Than You Think

Just how dependable are Cisco voice over IP solutions?  This uncertainty is why many people get concerned when they find out they will be using a phone that is attached to the data network. 

These concerns are rooted in several sources.

• Historic network performance – computer networks in general have the persona of being somewhat reliable.  Many consider the performance of an Internet connection as what they could expect of a new IP phone system. It’s the “somewhat reliable” that causes concern.


• Perceived network performance/PC performance – websites, applications or the PC appear to be sluggish at times.  While this could be due to any number of factors, to the typical end user, this is the network.


• Reliable phone systems – there is no doubt the telecommunications industry has created traditional phone systems that are extremely reliable. This minimizes the need to switch because they don’t understand the benefits beyond dial tone.

There is an industry joke that if a network engineer maintains a data network with 95% uptime, he is a hero.  If a telecommunications engineer maintains a telephone network with 95% uptime, he is fired! 

However, given the advancements that Cisco has made in this technology space, systems can now be designed and configured to provide better reliability than traditional phone systems.  The very basic concept of IP telephony allows for tremendous flexibility, scalability, and more importantly, reliability. 

Traditional phone systems have all the functionality built into the PBXs – configuration, call processing, call routing, voicemail, PSTN connectivity, and handset connectivity – to name a few.  IP telephony breaks these functions out into separate devices that can be dispersed throughout the network, as well as duplicated to provide redundancy.  Now you can have a voice gateway with PSTN connection in 2 offices and provide backup PSTN connectivity to each site or have call processors in the 2 locations to provide backup call processing and call routing to ensure that you always have the ability to send and receive phone calls.

Aside from utilizing redundant equipment, most recent voice server applications use the concept of active and in-active partitions.  This now allows for more efficient upgrading of the application but also a fall-back plan if the new upgrade doesn't perform as expected – all with minimal downtime (recall that we are using redundant equipment as well!)

Cisco’s latest development has been to move the voice application servers to a virtual environment.  This not only reduces operating cost, but also provides a robust platform for streamlining the deployment of voice application servers making the switch from a traditional telephone system easier than ever..

So what are you waiting for?  Find out how your company can benefit from Cisco Unified Communications today!

Today's post written by: Nathan Richie, boice.net Network Consultant