AudioCodes and Microsoft to present

Monthly webinar series to feature presenters
from Microsoft and industry-expert guest speakers  

One of the projects I've been working on this last month is a eight-part monthly educational webinar series focused on enterprise  migration paths to Unified Communications (UC) with Microsoft Lync. 

My goal of the eight-part webinar series is to educate businesses and the partner community on various Lync deployment options, best practices and technical “tips” on how to effectively make the migration to a full Unified Communications environment with Microsoft Lync.  I've worked dilligently to secure a group of industry experts,  VSPs, VARs, and Microsoft as presenters for the series, responding to feedback from previous event attendees who continue to ask for more in-depth  sessions with greater technical detail, more “how to” content and additional customer case studies.

Guest Speakers

The UC Migration webinar series will feature presentations from:

• Thomas Binder, Architect Voice CoE,  Microsoft
• Michael Nelson, Vice President of Integrated Access Solutions (IAS)
• Pascal Menezes, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft
• François van Hemert, Architect Voice CoE, Microsoft
• Kam Toor, Senior Program Manager Lead, Microsoft
• Jon Morrow, Senior Program Manager – Unified Communications, Microsoft
• Chris Sheridan, Solutions Architect, Sentri and a vTSP for Microsoft

…and others to be announced

Webinar series abstract:

Schedule of Dates and Topics:

Participation Drawings with Nine Chances to Win!

In appreciation for attendee’s participation in a post-event survey, AudioCodes is holding a drawing for an iPad 2 after each event and a vacation voucher at the completion of the entire series.

Registration Information

I hope you do join me and the panel of great presenters.  This is a great opportunity to learn from "some of the best" in the industry.  For registration information, visit the webinar information page at:

www.audiocodes.com/uc-migration-series 

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What drives the adoption of E-SBCs?  Security (worry about a security attack or breach), but interoperability seems to be the widest need for E-SBCs.  Many UC applications need some SIP format manipulation to facilitate communications.

Miki form Sonus speculated that with the new SIP Trunking offerings coming from the tier 1 service providers, we'll see a greater need for interop and E-SBCs.

We discussed the interoperability issue, from both a technical and business perspective - fixing SIP messages and allowing existing systems from different vendors allows a more "migratory" path, avoiding a rip-and-replace event and the expenses incurred.

Next we moved on to the issue of federation and business-level peering.  We at AudioCodes have federated with a number of our partners, suppliers and customers.  The experience changes the way you work and allows you to instant message, see presence and share your desktop with those you federate with very easily.  Expect E-SBCs to be an active enabler to federation and peering.

At the request of a session attendee, we also spent some time discussing reliability and issues that result in a single-point of failure.  The panel agreed that both HA pairing and Branch Office Appliances were available and part of the solution.

As a final topic, we looked ahead and it was agreed that federation/peering will be transformational to businesses and E-SBCs.

Plenty more going on this week - I'll be sure to share the highlights (and save the low-lights).

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Comments on this Entry:

(Steve Weinstock on Jan 5, 2012 2:27 PM)

As part of our overall strategy, ShoreTel continues to invest in the open architecture of our core system and in driving value through our Innovation Network program. ShoreTel’s distributed architecture includes an array of open interfaces that seamlessly integrate third-party information and applications.

If anything we are looking to remove hurdles and barriers to integration, and are building interfaces and tools that allow others to extend the capabilities of the ShoreTel system and embed our UC features into customers’ other core business systems. I don’t believe in punishing customers who choose to augment the ShoreTel solution with 3rd party solutions. Having lived through the era of silos I see the value from the vendors perspective in ease. But, ultimately the customer is the one who pays. Our belief is that it should be simple for the customer, which sometimes means we, as manufacturers, need to work harder.

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(Rich Tehrani on Oct 7, 2011 2:52 PM)

Alan, I went to two shows this week, Metaswitch Forum and Interop NY and didn't see you at either (unusual). Now I know why. :-) thanks for the photos - informative piece.

Image via CrunchBase

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FAQ: SIP Trunking and Unified Communications - What is the role of an Enterprise SBC? - May 05, 2011

SIP Trunking Case Study: Triton Technologies - Sep 20, 2010

Skype Connect - Is there a new carrier in town? - Aug 31, 2010

Interview with Joel Maloff @ BandTel - Mar 11, 2009

Comments on this Entry:

(aaron on Aug 12, 2011 7:16 PM)

Sip trunking is a very cost effective way to save money. Some customers or businesses are scared that it will affect call quality when if fact it may be better than what they previously had. We use Nextiva's sip trunking service and they seem to do much better than our previous provider

So far, we’ve unlocked the power of Microsoft Lync for unified communications in your customer’s head office and branch offices – now there’s only one frontier left to tackle before we can call this solution complete: mobility.

While many businesses today leverage mobility to provide access, communications and connectivity to their highly-mobile employees, many of them do so without integrating it into their unified communications environment. That means that mobile workers are missing out on the many advantages enjoyed by their office-bound counterparts, including presence and instant messaging. Not only are they working blind, they’re paying more for the ability to do so – using up minutes from their expensive monthly allotment and almost inevitably being driven into fees for overages.

Fortunately, there’s an app for that.

AudioCodes’ MobilityPLUS mobile applications are available for iOS, Android, Nokia Symbian and Windows Phone platforms, and bring many of the now-familiar unified communications experiences to mobile workers’ smartphones. Click-to-call, presence and IM are all a breeze with MobilityPLUS. And even better – MobilityPLUS enables users to use WiFi or even 3G/4G voice networks (depending on the mobile carrier) for voice calls. This makes keeping in touch with the office while on the road as easy as finding the nearest Starbucks or other hotspot.

MobilityPLUS applications connect into the MobilityPLUS server, which takes care of SIP registration requests and connects them through to Microsoft Lync over SIP. The MobilityPLUS server can be run as an appliance on the Mediant 1000 media gateway or as a standalone server running Windows 2008 R2 64-bit edition.

And with that, we’ve built out in eight easy steps, a solution that transforms your customer’s communications infrastructure from a stagnant and expensive analogue phone system to the vibrant, ever-adapting, solutions-rich unified communications solution that incorporates video, chat and IM, integrated SIP-based telephony, and mobility. Your customer is saving money, ready for the future, and taking advantage of the investment Microsoft is putting into Lync, which it calls its next billion-dollar product.

Now that you’ve read through the eight steps to a complete unified communications solution, I invite you to get in touch with AudioCodes to discuss the next steps for making this great solution a reality for your customers. You can reach us via the Web, or by phone at (888) 586-4743.

Thanks for joining us for this blog series, and I hope to be helping you to do some unified communications conversions for your clients in the near future.

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So far, we’ve brought your entire customer’s organization into the unified communications world.

But what about businesses that have many branch or remote offices – retail locations, bank, insurance companies and others that are spread out over the country or even the world?

In this penultimate step, we bring those remote offices into the scope of the solution. What these remote locations need is the ability to get through to Lync and use SIP phones and trunking, but with some back-up survivable trunking to make sure they’re not taken down by outages. We’ve worked closely with Microsoft to create a line Survivable Branch Appliances (SBAs) that do just this job.

Our SBA lineup comes in 30-, 120- and 480-port versions, and includes all of the unified communications functionality we’ve talk about in the six steps leading to this one. AudioCodes SBAs take care of data (routing, WAN termination, firewall), voice (secured SIP trunking through enterprise-class session border controller) and advanced applications like support for SIP phones, smartphone integration and passive recording through Lync.

And it does all that in one neat box that can be easily tucked away in a branch office’s wiring closet. That makes it easy for your to deploy and install even for companies with a large number of small branches, keeps acquisition and installation costs to a miniumum, and keeps the crowded wiring closet clean, replacing a handful of different boxes that need to be powered and connected with one appliance.

So we’ve now taken care of unified communications just about everywhere your customers work. Except maybe Starbucks. In the modern work world, more people are road warriors more often, so having a mobility component to your unified communications strategy is truly crucial. In the eighth and final step to this guide, we’ll put a cherry on top of this UC deployment by adding mobility features.

Continue reading to Step 8 >>

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Over the last few step in our eight-step guide to unified communications, we’ve introduce da lot of new capabilities and functionality that will not only make sure the deployment is a success, it will drive end users to demand access to the new tools.

Now it’s time to start making this deployment just as exciting to management – and if there’s one thing the C-suite can behind, it’s the idea of saving serious money. To make that happen, it’s time to introduce SIP trunking and downsizing or eliminating traditional PSTN trunks. In reality, this is a step you can take at an earlier point, should you choose to do so, or should getting those cost savings on the table earlier be of prime importance for customers.

Getting started is as simple as upgrading the Mediant 1000 gateway we introduced way back at the beginning of this guide to add Enterprise Session Border Controller (E-SBC) capabilities. If you’re done your planning right throughout the process, this should be as simple as adding software key on the gateway, but in some circumstances, you may have to swap out a module or two. Our team of AudioCodes sales engineers would be happy to help determine the right path forward for any particular customer, so please call on them should you have any questions.

Once E-SBC features are turned on, SIP trunks can be brought in, you can start routing calls through the new trunk to E-SBC, which will reformat incoming SIP messages to be compatible with Lync as well as making sure traffic is safe and secure.

With that, much of the traffic can be moved over to the SIP trunk and you can look at downsizing PSTN trunks. In some cases, you’ll be able to PSTN outright, but many businesses like to keep a few lines around for survivability purposes or for local access numbers.

At this point, the job is pretty much done at the headquarters location. The blanks remaining to be filled in: remote offices/branch offices, and mobility. We’ll tackle those two pieces of the puzzle in the remaining two steps.

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In any big project – and let’s face it, going from a traditional telephony system to a fully-integrated unified communications system is a big project! – there’s a step at which the point of no return is past – where the hardest work is done, the old system is just about retired, and everything you do from there on in will add more and more value to the overall solution.

In step five, we cross that Rubicon. It’s time to get rid of the PBX.

Over the previous four steps, we’ve taken care of a lot of the steps to reach this goal – now it’s just a matter of rounding up the stragglers, as it were.

From fax machines to analogue phones in public places where hosting an expensive SIP phone doesn’t make sense, there are bound to be some devices in your customers’ environments that simply aren’t going to make the trip to unified communications as easy as the SIP-compliant parts will. But we’ve got a solution that will keep them in the new solution and working as good as ever, or better!

To make this happen, we’ll add an FXS module to the Mediant 1000 gateway we’ve been building on since the beginning of this process, or (as was possible with SPS in the last step) we’ll bring in FXS as a stand-alone appliance. Once again, SPS will take care of connecting the analogue devices connected to those FXS ports to Lync.

As sad and lonely an image as it creates, the PBX is now ready for retirement. Such is the nature of ongoing evolution of technology. With the greater value of unified communications unlocked, it’s time to bid adieu to the old, expensive PBX. Remember back in step three when we recommended you take advantage of the “drop and insert” architecture in connecting trunk lines into the UC solution? Here’s where doing that really pays off. Moving traffic that used to be routed to the PBX over to Lync is as simple as making some changes to the routing tables in the Mediant – no physical re-cabling to be done. Once you’ve completed this “soft cut” away from the PBX, you can physically remove the PBX, and start getting ready to put the finishing touches on this once-daunting project.

In the next step, we’ll take care of one of the last foundational changes on the route to unified communications – we’ll make the transfer to full SIP trunking.

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At this point, we’ve addressed voicemail via Exchange, IM, presence and collaboration and voice and video, and structured your client’s network for the new converged workload through the first three steps of our journey towards complete unified communications.

You may notice that we haven’t touched phones yet. Now, with the trunk line connected to the AudioCodes Mediant media gateway, it’s a good time to think about phones. Because although the hype around unified communications is all about communicating via softphones and using just about any device an end user wants to use to stay connected --- there are still are a lot of people that want to or have to use a phone, whether it’s some of the time or all of the time.

Fortunately, that’s easy enough to do.

Now, we’d love it if every customer were to rip and replace their existing phones with brand new SIP phones. And we’d especially love it if they’d do so with our AudioCodes 320HD IP Phones. Moving to the 320HD or another Lync-certified SIP phone would offer the most functionality for end users, the best overall experience, and the most profitability for you.

But in a lot of cases, that may not be realistic. Sometimes a customer has made a significant (and recent!) investment in SIP phones and isn’t ready to rip and replace quite yet. Or maybe they’re concerned about sending more lightly used technology to the landfill.

Whatever their motivation for hanging onto their existing SIP phones, you’re covered. Audiocodes’ SIP Phone Server (SPS) software is available as either a stand-alone server appliance or an OSN module for your gateway, and can connect a wide array of SIP-based phones with Microsoft Lync, making the transition easier and less expensive for customers.

So however your customers want to proceed to SIP phones connected to Microsoft Lync, you can make sure they’re getting up and running.

“But wait a second,” I hear you say. “That’s all fine and good for customers who existing SIP-based phones. But what about other legacy phone systems that aren’t SIP-based?” We’ve got a solution for that, and we’ll bring it to you in the next step.

This is really starting to look like a true unified communications system. In terms of effort, the biggest steps are behind us, but there are still four important steps for getting to go. In our next step, we’ll make the transition to unified communications all that much more complete by starting to move customers fully off their legacy PBX.

Continue to Step 5 >>

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Now, we’re going to add a whole lot more value to Lync by getting voice and video flowing over the network. Some of your customers may have already thought through this step a bit and have a network with abundant bandwidth, lots of headroom and great Quality of Service. However, for the rest of your customers, there’s a big first step to be taken here. Many customers LANs are going to have to be upgraded and rearchitected for the increased traffic that voice and video will add. There are great tools available from Microsoft and others to help you figure out exactly how much of an upgrade your customer’s network may need.

Once the network is ready for the final integrated voice video and data traffic it will be seeing, it’s time to start choosing pilot users for your voice and video solution. Just like in the last step, consider the teachings of Metcalfe’s laws and choose teams that communicate amongst each other regularly. Migrate them all at the same time, and all will get the most out of the experience. This way you build up excitement and buzz and those who’ve yet to be moved will be clamoring for the new functionality to be available across the enterprise.

As part of this step, it’s time to integrate the old PBX phone lines with Microsoft Lync, allowing users to communicate across the two communications platforms. This is as simple as adding ports to your AudioCodes Mediant media gateway and tying them to the PBX.

Next, we recommend you move the trunk lines away from the PBX and onto the gateway. AudioCodes’ “drop and insert” architecture makes this easy, and it means you’ll be using the routing capabilities of the gateway to make sure calls to users who’ve been migrated to Lync will go directly to them, while other calls are routed to the PBX. Our partners tell us that using drop-and-insert takes away the headaches of adding ports to the PBX, adding TDM cards and having to reconfigure the PBX. It also helps you get ready for the next steps to come.

It’s also fully utilizing the capabilities of the Mediant media gateway, which at this point is creating links amongst the PBX, Exchange and Lync – a unique capability that only AudioCodes can bring you!

Some other things to think about at this step – the peripherals you need to work with. For mobile people, headsets are simply a must. They will be used often and really allow your staff to get the most out of the options available for them. Urge your customers to invest in good headsets. On the other hand, you may want to counsel them to hold off on video cameras. Our experience – and that of many of our customers – is that video does get used, but it gets used very opportunistically and only for those select few conversations that really need a face-to-face feel. Take the time to figure out how your customers are going to use video, both in policy and practice, before you spend a lot of money on top-of-the-line Webcams for everyone.

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In step one of our eight-step approach to helping your customer get to true unified communications, we covered off the small but important step of getting voicemail linked up through Exchange Server UM, using an AudioCodes Mediant 1000 media gateway to translate from TDM to SIP.

In step two, we start to really introduce exciting new features and functionality for your customer – it’s time to introduce Microsoft Lync, Microsoft’s all-in-one corporate instant messaging, collaboration and presence system.

The key to success with a Lync implementation is to make sure it gets used. Metcalfe’s Law (the value of the network goes up exponentially as the number of nodes on the network increases) applies here, so it’s best to get as much of your customer’s organization up and running as quickly as possible. If you’re going to start with a sub-section of the organization though, go with rolling Lync out across a functional team, like sales or marketing. Once the members of that team are using the power of Lync, with integrated presence, instant messaging and collaboration, world will spread quickly through the enterprise, and users who haven’t been moved to Lync yet will be beating down IT’s doors demanding access to the new collaboration tools.

Once everyone’s up and running and starting to get to know Lync, it’s probably a good time to do some introductory training. While Lync is pretty easy to get around, you can really help make sure every user understands every feature of instant messaging and collaboration tool, and is getting as much as possible out of the Lync experience. Training doesn’t just include discovering and using all the features of Lync, there’s often some policy or etiquette training that should be done too, especially if this is the first time your customer has deployed presence and IM in any kind of official fashion.

Many of our customers have found Lync to be a tremendously powerful tool when it comes to increasing productivity, and we have as well with our own implementation at AudioCodes. With a little bit of nudging in the right direction, your customers will too!

At this point, voice is still flowing through the PBX, but you’ve got Lync up and running and integrated with Exchange. You’re starting to build a very solid foundation for your customer’s unified communications strategy.

Congratulations! That’s one more big step out of the way on the path to unified communications for your customer. Take a break and relax, because the next step’s a big one. Up next, we’ll tackle introducing voice and video over the LAN, including making sure your customer’s network is up for the bandwidth challenges that integrated video can pose.

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