The Future of Communications

Market Drivers

No other industry is undergoing as fundamental a change today as the telecommunications industry.  The internet protocol (IP) is rapidly becoming the standard for all types of communications including voice and video, converging wireline and wireless technologies, therefore, software companies entering the communications industry and Internet companies such as Yahoo are including software communications technologies as part of their services.

The key driver behind these changes is the desire of individuals and organizations to use communication technologies in order to capitalize on fundamental changes occurring within society today. Globalization, economic pressures, the socio-political climate and the threat of catastrophic events all cause organizations to become increasingly distributed, virtual and mobile. Improved communications technology is being touted as the solution that can maintain the value of face-to-face interactions and the instant availability of a distributed workforce. 

For a more comprehensive inventory of these market drivers, please refer to Avistar's whitepaper, "Market Needs and Unified Communications." 

Communications as a Software Application

To keep pace with the demands placed on communications technology, the telecommunications industry is undergoing a fundamental paradigm shift: a move away from dedicated communications devices towards application software. Hardware appliances and equipment are inherently unable to adapt to changing demands. They are designed to provide a small and fixed set of capabilities and any features beyond those fixed capabilities will feel complicated and non-intuitive. Software applications, by contrast, are designed to support a rich set of capabilities and are intended to evolve over time as market requirements change.

The market has started to refer to this new category of communications software as Unified Communications: the convergence of many different and stove-piped telecommunications technologies under a common umbrella that provides a feature rich software interface to access these technologies. -

Application-Integrated Unified Communications

Conventional wisdom states that Unified Communications is about giving people a unified application for all their underlying communication technologies with the goal of making communications more efficient. For example, Unified Communications makes it easier to get in touch with someone on the first try, thereby reducing wasted time and improving business velocity.

By providing software interfaces to a Unified Communications software platform, three benefits can be realized:

• First and foremost integration of communications software with productivity software allows these applications to provide more effective collaboration while providing the right context to the various parties communicating (this is typically referred to as contextual collaboration). This is about making communications and collaboration a "first class citizen" in the workflow. Call center software has historically done this well, but there are many more untapped opportunities in other applications.
• Second and often overlooked: it becomes possible to keep track of the real interactions that go on every day in an organization and extract common interaction patterns. These interaction patterns point out who the real information gatekeepers are in an organization, who the go-to people are and who are the movers and shakers. Forget social networking software, empower the system to figure out where the strong links are in an organization, independent of organizational boundaries.
• And third, it allows for the capturing, distributing and recording of communications and recorded interactions part of the "context" that gets saved in enterprise database. This translates "people memory" into "corporate memory" and enables much more efficient context switching between different people in an organization (e.g. multiple people providing the same role at different times, "hand-off" between time zones of tasks that get worked on 24/7, etc.)

The idea of Unified Communications makes IT professionals nervous, yet provides new found value to business leaders, although scaled adoption of voice and video on corporate IP networks run the risk of overwhelming capacities. Conventional wisdom states that deploying voice and video on IP networks requires significant investments in network infrastructure, specifically in the areas of QOS, policy-based routing and reservation protocols.  Network companies like Cisco are investing heavily in making their networks more application-aware with the goal of providing better service quality on these networks.

In practice, however, network technologies have proven to be hard to manage, limited in scalability, expensive and slow in delivery. Moreover, they frequently fall short in guaranteeing an acceptable experience to the end user since they cannot manage quality end to end.

Avistar takes a fundamentally different approach. We believe the best way to deliver a high-quality experience to the end user is by putting the intelligence in the application layer and letting the application control what happens on the network. In addition, the applications should be designed to adapt to whatever underlying network conditions occur at any given time. Avistar has solved the hard problems associated with managing audio and video communications at scale. Rather than being bogged down by the complexities of implementing application-aware networks, Avistar gives administrators the power to manage real-time communications through network-aware applications. Whereas application software can quickly and intelligently adapt to changing network implementations and real time changes in conditions, networks cannot easily adapt in a timely fashion to diverse and dynamically changing application deployments.

By providing the ability to embed rich media communications into the market leading unified communications solutions and support the ability to deploy at scale without requiring network rebuilds, Avistar enables enterprises to voice and video enable their UC implementations today to accelerate integration of these emerging platforms into key business processes faster and cost efficiently.

Shepherd

Of course, many organizations use multiple, real-time communications technologies. Are you deploying VoIP? Is your organization deploying telepresence videoconferencing systems? Are your mobile users requesting PC-based voice and video on their laptops?  Is centrally viewing and managing the bandwidth requirements of all these disparate technologies out of your reach? Does your organization require better communications tools, but you’re uncomfortable with the lack of a comprehensive set of tools to manage all types of real-time communications?

If so, ask Avistar about Shepherd. Avistar’s Shepherd extends Avistar’s unique, proven application software-based bandwidth management and rich media call admission control solutions to enable network administrators to have a panoramic view and a centralized management tool for deploying these solutions at scale across the enterprise.

For more information about Avistar's Shepherd, email us at avistarshepherd@avistar.com