Second Principle of Open Communications

Greetings Everyone and first let me apologize for my long absence since my last blog. I have been working feverishly on a new Go To Market Approach for our UC portfolio and I was also fighting a rather serious cold for the last few weeks (OK this is better than telling you all the dog ate my homework isnt it). I hope to post soon on this new market approach but today I want to continue on with the seven principles I laid out in my initial blog. The second key principle of Open Communications is the idea of "IT Based Communications". At first glance this might seem like a nifty marketing term but if you start to think about what this might mean for your enterprise it becomes very relevant in the way in which enterprises design and deploy communications into their enterprise architectures. By way of background its common knowledge that most communication platforms have been implemented as standalone components with perhaps one or two narrowly defined interfaces that would touch the IT infrastructure. With the advent of IP telephony and now Unified Communications, the power of software has revolutionized the concept of how you deploy your communication assets. In addition, there is no longer the implication that communication is only voice oriented. In fact communications has become multimodal with email, chat, text, web, and video coferencing all playing a vital role in how enterprise customers interact.  Of coures voice still plays a foundational role in this new paradigm and its critical to understand that customers should not have to put up with less voice capability to enjoy the benefits of richer communication functions.

For IT based Communications to be succesful, it has to be tied into both the application fabric as well as the infrastructure fabric if an enterprise architecture. The application fabric refers to embedding the realtime functions of communications, presence, and collaboration into the day to day workflow of your subscribers. This is commonly referred to as Business Process integration or Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP). Instead of having tightly defined and largely separate domains for voie and IT, the two are tightly woven together and realtime communications are consumed into application space.The second component of this principle is the integration of your communication assets into the IT infrastructure. I submit this is an equally important and critical element of Open Communications. The extent to which an Communications element can be designed, deployed, integrated and managed by standard IT best practices and tools, signifies the degree to which a vendors implementation can be considered IT Based Communications. Some examples include the following

 

• leveraging the standards based interfaces and protocols in use at the infrastructure layer.
• Providing either direct connectivity or proxy based connectivity to enterprise FCAPS platforms so that the communication infrastructure and IT based infrastructure can be managed in a holistic manner.
• Supporting deployment options such as virtualization so that your communication software assets can be deployed in the same manner as other IT applications.

We are in the beginning phase of Unified Communications Transformation and its imperative that customers evaluate their vendors on these principles. As I mentioned in a previous post, once customers take a hard look at these principles and start applying them to their vendors, the list gets short in a hurry.

Drop me a line or post some comments whether you agree or disagree. I promise my next post will come much sooner.