Fantastic military insight into UC from FCW.com: 

Although military technologists sometimes talk about the Global Information Grid in the present tense, one element of the GIG vision that is still in the works is the implementation of a global everything-over-IP network that allows phone, videoconferencing and other synchronous communications to ride over the same IP network that e-mail and other data communications use.

The transition to unified communications and collaboration is also playing out in the corporate world, where voice-over-IP (VOIP) phones are appearing more frequently. Richer communications sessions that combine voice, video, chat, Web collaboration and desktop application sharing are also becoming more common. And the same is true in the military — at least, in certain enclaves that have deployed the required network upgrades. But making such services span the full breadth and depth of the military is a much bigger challenge and will take years to achieve.

“Scaling is always an issue,” said Pat Ryan, director of defense initiatives at Cisco Systems. Only a few large commercial organizations, such as Wal-Mart, might have network scaling challenges that rival those of the U.S. military, and even they don’t have the same life-or-death information security requirements, he added. “For the most part, industry does not require the same scale or information assurance.”

“Today, what we have are islands of IP telephony in oceans of TDM,” said James Reilly, chief of systems engineering, architecture and plans at the Defense Information Systems Agency, which is upgrading the military’s global networks for unified communications.

TDM, or time-division multiplexing, is the telephony standard the Defense Switched Network (DSN) uses. DISA also operates global IP networks that are used primarily for asynchronous data transmissions. But the goal is to get everything — including phone calls, phone conferencing and videoconferencing — working over IP, without sacrificing quality or reliability.

“In order to do that, we need to apply assured service techniques on IP networks, end to end, that today don’t exist,” Reilly said.

As the everything-over-IP network is phased in, it should pay off in a few ways, including:

• Less equipment to deploy and maintain because separate voice and data circuits will be unnecessary.
• Reduced administrative, maintenance and technical training costs. As TDM is phased out, there will be less need for technicians specialized in maintaining military phone systems, which become just another application on the IP network.
• Improved capabilities for multimode communication and collaboration. For example, a presence service tied to computer and phone systems can indicate who is at their desks. Employee directories can include real-time information that provides clues as to whether someone would be best reached by desk phone, instant message or mobile phone — or via IP radio mounted in a Humvee or carried by a soldier in the mountains of Afghanistan. A common infrastructure would facilitate collaboration sessions that combine data exchange with voice or video.

“What I’m really talking about here, in terms of our communications and collaboration vision, is primarily the synchronous side,” Reilly said.

Riding VOIP’s coattails

As VOIP becomes more broadly deployed, other synchronous collaboration tools ride on its coattails. That’s because the Session Initiation Protocol that VOIP systems use to set up and tear down connections also works with video calls and other modes of communication, such as instant messaging. When a SIP device registers with a network, it provides information about its capabilities, such as whether it can display video. Some SIP devices also convey presence information for display in a network directory or instant messaging buddy list.

Presence detection is a key capability for military communications and collaboration because it should make it easier for an officer dealing with a crisis to quickly identify, locate and contact relevant experts; make command and control decisions; and issue orders, Reilly said.

DISA supports presence detection, Web conferencing and instant-messaging capabilities as part of its Net-Centric Enterprise Services program. Customers can choose between the e-CollabCenter, based on IBM’s Lotus Sametime, and the Defense Connect Online service, based on the combination of Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional and Jabber Extensible Communications Platform for instant messaging. Those two programs — often referred to as Button One and Button Two because the military sometimes offers users access to both — are competing to establish themselves, or at least their features, as the standard for military communication.

The use of asynchronous collaboration tools, such as blogs and wikis, is also growing in the military and intelligence communities, but such tools are more easily supported on existing data networks. Eventually, Reilly said, they might also take advantage of a richer network environment — for example, by allowing the reader of a blog to easily initiate a phone or video call with the blog’s author. Desktop software for data analysis, mapping, visualization and other applications could also be integrated with unified communications, allowing employees at different locations to work collaboratively with data while conducting a phone conference.

“What I’m describing is not where we are today, but it is where we envision we would like to get to,” Reilly said.

The U.S. military pioneered the creation of the Internet protocols. But although packet-switched Internet networks won acceptance in the military for data transmission, until comparatively recently, they couldn’t challenge traditional circuit-switched phone technology for tasks such as transmitting the sound of a voice back and forth smoothly enough to support a conversation.

Data transmissions can tolerate the irregular delivery of packets to a greater extent, in the sense that if the transmission of an e-mail message is interrupted momentarily and restarts a second later, the recipient will probably never know the difference. But when delays and jittery delivery occur in the middle of a voice or videoconferencing transmission, they can ruin a conversation.

Network prioritization and quality-of-service techniques have emerged to address those issues by instructing the network to give voice and video preferential treatment over data that is more tolerant of delays. However, the challenge is still steep for military networks that need to stretch across satellite links and reach far into the field. DISA is working on providing voice and video services over IP that will match the reliability of the current DSN phone and videoconferencing systems.

One promising technique is to segment traffic with different requirements into separate virtual private networks within the IP network, combined with a related technology called VPN routing and forwarding. VPNs are usually thought of in terms of encrypting communications for privacy, but they can also be used to separate classes of traffic that require special treatment, Reilly said.

DISA is working toward an initial test deployment of end-to-end voice and video support on its Defense Information Systems Network that has a level of quality and reliability that Reilly promises will be as good as or better than what is available via DSN.

Jessie Showers, chief of the Real Time Services Division at DISA, said testing of those services will start this month with a small number of users and should reach the initial operational capability phase by April 2010. A second spiral phase of the deployment will include a transition to IPv6, which supports a larger number of network addresses to help the military stay ahead of the growth in the volume of connected devices. Participating network vendors are already required to demonstrate that their equipment supports IPv6 or can be upgraded to support it, Showers said.

The network backbone upgrade should be complete by July 2011, he added. A lot of work will remain for DISA customers who want to take full advantage of unified communications at GIG scale, but at that point, they won’t be able to point to DISA as the bottleneck, Showers said.

Secret networks on fast track

In some ways, the unified communications effort is further along on the military’s Secret IP Router Network (SIPRnet) than on NIPRnet, the parallel Unclassified but Sensitive IP Router Network. SIPRnet users can already take advantage of a phone service DISA calls voice over secure IP. Because access to SIPRnet is restricted, the network is smaller and has less competition for bandwidth, making reliable delivery of voice and video easier to achieve.

“On the SIPRnet side, you don’t have a connection to the Internet, so you’re able to control your bandwidth better,” Reilly said. Because NIPRnet is connected to the Internet — albeit with the protection of firewalls and other security devices — it poses greater information assurance and security challenges, he added.

For similar reasons, the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS) network operated by the Defense Intelligence Agency for carrying top-secret information is also further along on the unified communications path.

“On the classified side, I would say we’re probably significantly ahead of where most commercial organizations are today,” said Michael Mestrovich, senior technology officer for innovation at DIA.

The agency supports about 1,100 videoconferencing rooms, 2,400 desktop videoconferencing units and 19,000 VOIP phones on the JWICS network. The videoconferencing systems are integrated to the extent that desktop and room-based systems can be connected to the same meeting. Ideally, a user who could only get to a VOIP phone would be able to join a videoconference as a voice-only participant, but that level of integration hasn’t been achieved yet.

And because those systems grew up in parallel, there is also some redundancy between them, Mestrovich said. “We recognize that instead of having three call manager systems and infrastructure staffs, they need to be merged together,” he added.

Furthermore, officials have not yet fully exploited some of the possibilities for enriching collaboration by using presence detection, Mestrovich said.

Deploying unified communications far out into the field will be challenging for all branches of the military. For example, at many critical locations in Afghanistan, mountainous terrain blocks line-of-sight communication and forces warfighters to depend on satellite connections. Besides dramatically reducing the available bandwidth, satellite links introduce a delay of about 600 milliseconds into every transmission.

“That doesn’t necessarily mean voice and video traffic won’t function, but getting these tools out to the very edge in austere environments is going to be one of the most challenging aspects,” Mestrovich said.

DIA’s networking efforts are largely independent of DISA’s, said Grant Schneider, DIA’s chief information officer. The agency takes advantage of wide-area networking bandwidth supplied by DISA, but DIA data is encrypted for transmission and managed separately, he said. DIA employees have access to SIPRnet, but cross-domain connections between JWICS and SIPRnet are tightly controlled and do not include unified communications, he added.

Schneider said he expects to continue offering richer unified communications capabilities to JWICS users. But figuring out the best way to do it is not necessarily easy, he said. For example, there are trade-offs that come with trying to pack too many modes of communications into one device, such as asking a PC to handle voice and video on top of other tasks, Schneider said.

“Some would say that for optimum command and control, you really want a separate mechanism for voice and video communication,” he added.

Consolidating equipment

Although there might be times when two devices are better than one, a big part of the military’s push toward unified communications comes from the desire for consolidation.

Reilly said part of the reason DISA initiated VOIP support on SIPRnet was that combatant commanders with sensitive missions demanded a way to simplify their equipment requirements. “They wanted the deployed user to be able to minimize the footprint he takes out with him on a deployment,” Reilly said. “When it comes to communications, they would like to have one device — an IP device.”

Besides lightening the load for deployed troops, moving to unified communications should also save money, said Charlie Kawasaki, chief technical officer at PacStar, which sells military networking systems based on Cisco Systems’ unified computing product line. Every piece of military networking equipment must be ruggedized and otherwise modified to meet military requirements, he added.

“If you don’t have everything over IP, you’re shipping out your deployable team with a whole bunch of extra equipment, such as IP-to-serial converters,” he said. “Every additional piece of equipment is incredibly expensive for a whole bunch of reasons.”

More of this article at: http://fcw.com/Articles/2009/07/08/Military-communications-collaboration.aspx?s=fcwdaily_080709&Page=6

Global businesses can save a lot by switching to integrated audio conferencing services for their day to day operations. Read on to know more.

In today’s’ business, we have to cut cost and cut down on unnecessary expenses. Observing and keep expenses under control in a business which is wide spread across the nation or countries can be cumbersome. The management will have the tendency to travel from one branch to another, just to make sure that everything is running smoothly and effectively.

To avoid all the traveling, top managers from all different branches can meet at the same time, on the same day, for their conference meeting over an Audio Conference Call. This is an efficient and most cost effective way of having your meeting accomplished without spending days traveling. This kind of conference calls can be carried out in your office, privately over your telephone, and with all or a few selected board members or managers.

These conferences not only allow you to be connected to all the members at the same time but also provide the flexibility to send private messages or initiate a private talk with select few members on the call.

Another advantage of this audio conference is that, it is cost effective. In the past years, audio conference was carried out via the telephone facilities. Now, it can be carried out via the internet facilities which lands up being less expensive. Having a broad band and/or ADSL net connection makes audio conferencing easier and smoother. It’s like chatting via yahoo messenger or MSN. However, it should also be noted, that to have access to this, it is best to use the services of a established audio and web conferencing companies. These companies provide value added services and ensure seamless and 24/7 availability of the system for your needs.

It’s high time to make use of these latest technologies and have a smooth business flow!

The European unified communications (UC) market totalled $2.6bn (£1.7bn) last year and will increase at a compound average growth rate of 39 per cent every to $13.5bn by 2013, according to market watcher IDC.

Research from the firm also suggests that UC could change the way European enterprises buy voice and data solutions.

IDC drew attention to the fact that most sales efforts have previously been focused on selling to the IT department, but with the integration of voice and data with critical business applications, line-of-business managers are getting more involved in the negotiation process.

Chris Barnard, research director for European telecoms and networking at IDC, said: “In such a challenging market, where spending is plummeting, there is a strong opportunity for solutions that can reduce expenses, such as travel, in the short term. This means that UC, which includes video and audioconferencing and collaboration solutions, is one of the few technology areas well placed to grow during the recession.

“In addition to cost savings, we see that in Europe environmental issues are becoming a major driver of the overall UC market, and specific submarkets such as high-end videoconferencing in particular.”

The analyst has also predicted that UC will offer opportunities for network-related services players in the short and medium term.

In addition, IDC believes that in the first half of the forecast period, premise-based UC solutions will lead the market – the second half will be led by hosted solutions as fixed and mobile providers work out their UC strategies.

“In addition, we believe that the real longer-term UC opportunity lies with communications event management platforms that enable the enterprise to build new applications and enhance existing applications in order to streamline voice-intensive processes and deliver productivity gains,” added Barnard.

From Kayleigh Bateman CRN

Business and technology decision-makers are putting a high priority on providing optimized, streamlined communication between remotely dispersed information workers and their teams. Despite the advent of technologies such as instant messaging and various mobile devices, companies still face some difficulties in contacting key decision makers in a timely manner.

These challenges have created an urgent need among businesses—from SMBs to large enterprises—for an effective communication system that helps streamline business processes; reach the right person the first time; make communications more personal, collaborative, and mobile; and improves profitability.

Unified communications aims to bring about a sea change in the way businesses communicate and collaborate. It is an emerging class of applications and services designed to improve communications within the modern organization—to keep workgroups connected, help them collaborate effectively, and streamline business processes.

Lavanya Palani Batcha, Research Analyst, ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan, South Asia & Middle East, opined, “A strong factor working in favor of Unified Communications (UC) and videoconferencing solutions is that of faster ROI. Although the initial cost of investing in UC may be high, the integration of UC and enterprise-wide business processes such as Supply Chain, Contact Center, Sales enablement and Operations will communicate business sense and help the enterprise to understand the inherent benefits of investing in UC. Case studies exist which demonstrate that deploying UC can indeed help achieve higher efficiency, reduced cost per business process and increased productivity. Additionally by investing in a telepresence solution companies can save on travel costs and reduce their carbon footprint in the long-term.” Anshul Dhingra, Senior Marketing Manager, Polycom India & SAARC said, “In this tough economic environment, CEOs are trying to figure out how to reduce and contain costs —HD video and telepresence is an easy answer. Polycom’s broad range of HD video and telepresence solutions provides customers with a rapid ROI quickly showing real cash savings.” He added studies show telepresence is actually cheaper over time than traditional videoconferencing because usage rates are 10 times higher. Many Polycom HD and telepresence customers see a complete ROI for their investments in as little as 1-6 months. In general, respondents cited up to a 30% increase in productivity after the deployment of video in their companies. For highly compensated professionals and executives, the cost of hours and days wasted in transit can be equal to or more than the actual cost of the travel itself.

The first step towards having unified communications has been IP telephony, which took some time to gather momentum. Now that IP telephony has developed globally, there is an increasing interest in Unified Communications, or UC.  ROI on videoconferencing solutions can be measured by considering the factors such as high cost of air travel, other costs involved with travel and improving employee productivity in an organization.

Chetan Yardi, Country Manager, Lotus Software, IBM Software Group, India/ SA, said, “In India, videoconferencing is still considered an up market technology trend restricted to multinationals and other large companies. The average bandwidth ranges from 128-256 kbps. Videoconferencing five years ago was a costly affair but today due to competition there is a slight decrease in the pricing of bandwidth. Therefore, users are looking at videoconferencing as an option in order to communicate and collaborate.”

According to Batcha migration to an IP telephony platform is considered as the stepping-stone to UC. Going by the present market inclination towards IP telephony, the signs are encouraging. However, he added, “UC applications exist predominantly in silos today rather than as an integrated system in its entirety.”

Due to the recent developments in e-Governance, videoconferencing technology can be deployed in rural India to educate and inform farmers and the student community about the latest developments in their areas of interest. Newer concepts from foreign countries can be rendered to these villages, furthering the cause of national development.

The network has evolved beyond the traditional role of connectivity and in the next phase of the Internet, networks will enable sophisticated forms of human expression – voice and video—beyond personal computers, to Internet telephones, cell phones, PDAs, iPods, video game consoles, and of course, to televisions. “This phase of the Internet is all about innovation and productivity being centered on Web 2.0 and collaboration technologies such as Unified Communications and telepresence. We are also going to see a lot of convergence of voice, video, and data with mobility that would further help in-person collaboration and interaction,” opined Minhaj Zia, National Sales Manager, Unified Communications, Cisco India & SAARC.

“Hosted models would be the future as enterprises find it difficult to manage the solutions themselves. In times to come, we would also see an increasing interest in higher end HD videoconferencing as the prices of HD plunge,” added Bedi.

Manchanda said, “India is at a point where IP telephony sales are exceeding PBX shipments. Therefore, India already has a strong platform to enable newer technologies around UC. Additionally, Indian business has better potential to innovate on domain-specific applications by linking them to UC, given the IT experts in the country.”

The videoconferencing market is still in its growth stage in India and is expected to achieve critical mass in the coming years. However, with the current state of the economy, need to minimize costs, video conferencing is expected to gain strong traction going forward. The SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model has been gaining considerable interest in Asia-Pacific markets and it is anticipated that this trend will be seen in the Indian context as well.

With a wide variety of UC technologies available, enterprises and SMBs have enough to choose from depending on their requirements. Along with all the cost savings that they achieve from UC deployments, it also helps reduce carbon footprints, enabling a greener environment

The UC market in India has come a LONG way when it comes to implementing UC technologies. However, it has a few challenges to overcome in its present stage.

Some of the challenges faced are:

• Application performance problems: The biggest challenge in a unified communications implementation is application performance as it can cause trouble directly to the user experience. Quality of service is also imperative, and unified communications applications need consistent network performance because problems from other applications can easily affect the performance of UC applications.
• Insufficient expertise: Small to mid-sized companies may not have a good IT support in place as they may lack the expertise, training and vision.
• Bandwidth limitations: When a company is holding a videoconference, the demand on the network is high and constant. Therefore, lack of sufficient bandwidth on the network can result in the interruption of other applications on the network.

The biggest challenge in terms of UC implementation lies in the reliability, security and ease of maintenance of IP Networks.   Since UC comprises of different tools and technologies, organizations should have a limited number of vendors to ensure a fully integrated UC environment.

With approximately 50-60% of IT spend in the country expected to come from the flourishing SMB segment by 2008, according to NASSCOM, it is clear that there is a huge market waiting out there to be tapped. However, in order to tap this segment effectively, it is important that vendors develop customized solutions, which offer a cost-effective and easy to deploy alternative.

According to Vivek Porwal, BU Head–Unified Communications, Avaya GlobalConnect, “UC is a blessing in disguise for the SMB market. SMBs are the ones who need to deliver the most with minimal resources. Avaya has a strong strategy around SMB offerings including its IP Office integrated UC offering along with financial support from GlobalConnect Finance.”

SMBs often face manageability issues with unified communications. To address this issue, many vendors are offering hosted UC. Deepinder Bedi, Executive Director, Tulip Telecom, said, “We see an increasing interest in hosted UC, especially in the SMB market where customers want to focus on their core competencies and allow the experts to manage the complexities involved in UC. With our hosted model, we help small companies to start small without investing heavily on infrastructure. We also offer low-cost, open source solutions for SMBs who do not need the hosted model.”

Sanjay Manchanda, Director, Microsoft business division, Microsoft India, opined, “Organizations adopt different solutions depending on their needs. Companies that do not have a sound IT infrastructure, especially SMBs, prefer hosted solutions.”

1. The Virtual Workplace will become the rule. Desk phones and computers will gradually disappear, replaced by mobile devices, including laptops that take on traditional office capabilities. Social networking tools and virtual world meeting experiences will simulate the feeling of being there in-person.
2. Instant messaging and other real-time collaboration tools will become the norm, bypassing e-mail. Just as e-mail became a business necessity, a new generation of workers has a new expectation for IM as the preferred method of business interaction. This will fuel rapid adoption of unified communications as traditional IM becomes the core extension point for multi-modal communications.
3. Beyond phone calls to collaborative business processes. Companies will go beyond the initial capabilities of IM, like click-to-call and online presence, to deep integration with business processes and line-of-business applications, where they can realize the greatest benefit.
4. Interoperability and open standards will tear down proprietary walls across business and public domains. Corporate demand for interoperability and maturing of industry standards will force unified communications providers to embrace interoperability.
5. New meeting models will emerge. The definition of ‘meetings’ will radically transform and become increasingly ad hoc and instantaneous based on context and need.