Enterprise Conferencing is Coming

Enterprise Conferencing is Coming Your Way. Here's Why You Should Care.

By Ron Zalkind, The VoIP of Reason

http://news.tmcnet.com/news/2005/sep/1180049.htm

Anyone involved or interested in their company’s efforts to build a converged IP voice-data network should be vitally interested in Enterprise Conferencing. Why? Because Enterprise Conferencing can:

• Accelerate – and increase – the cost savings that your boss probably promised as the short-term justification for funding your converged network effort.
• Prevent the coming complexities that are certainly headed your way as different departments in your company adopt different Web and voice conferencing products and services.
• Make you a hero by providing a highly visible business benefit to every knowledge worker in your organization. When was the last time you could say that about an IT project?

What is Enterprise Conferencing?

I define Enterprise Conferencing as the integration of voice, video, and Web conferencing in a single, IP-based platform that can be widely deployed across your organization for use by people both inside and outside your company.

Enterprise Conferencing differs in several important ways from the voice and Web conferencing point applications you may be familiar with. Unlike these more limited applications, Enterprise Conferencing:

• Supports a wide range of business activities across multiple departments, from simple, small-group meetings to specialized seminars and learning activities involving thousands of internal and external participants.
• Addresses the needs of an increasingly mobile and dispersed workforce by allowing them access to these conferencing capabilities through a variety of devices – including PCs, TDM and IP phones, and mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs.
• Scales sufficiently to support extensive usage without choking network bandwidth or requiring lots of administration or support resources.
• Offers enough flexible deployment options to support initial trial as a hosted service, complete on-site installation, and customized on-site / hosted deployment that can change with your business requirements.
• Integrates with your company’s existing multi-vendor IT infrastructures – including products in the areas of communications (PBXs, IP Gateways), security (firewalls, proxy servers), management and administration (directory services, single sign-on systems), as well as process-oriented enterprise applications like portals, and systems for content management, ERP, CRM, and call centers.
• Supports a business model that allows your company to afford to roll out this conferencing “utility” broadly across the enterprise, just like email.

Why is it Becoming Such a Hot Topic Now?

Three trends are putting Enterprise Conferencing in the spotlight today:

After ten years of hype, converged networks are a reality.

According to Deloitte and Touche, 26% of Global 2000 companies are already using VoIP in some form today and two-thirds of them will have started deploying VoIP on the desktop by next year. Research by Gartner shows that spending on VoIP and VoIP hybrid systems is growing in excess of 30% this year, and that 97% of all new phone systems installed in North America by 2007 will be VoIP or VoIP hybrids. Service providers have jumped in with both feet to provide a wide range of IP services. Traditional TDM providers like AT&T, Verizon, BT and many others are offering both business and consumer VoIP services. Cross-over providers are selling IP services as well. Cable companies such as Comcast are touting their VoIP capabilities.

More importantly, my own personal observations from the field confirm what the pundits and statistics are saying. I spend a lot of time talking with our own customers and prospects and VoIP/converged networks are increasingly on their minds – and, not just the companies that are traditionally the early technology adopters. Recently, a large North American supermarket chain outlined to me their plans to completely revamp the voice infrastructure for their entire chain of local stores. Their plans call for removing all legacy TDM PBXs from the local stores and replacing them with an IP-based voice infrastructure. When this kind of conservative business, operating on razor thin margins, starts adopting IP voice technology on this scale, then I know these trends are real.

Critical software applications that use those converged networks have arrived:

Like any infrastructure, the value of converged networks remains latent until exploited by visible business applications. Enterprise Conferencing is the highest value, most visible application using capabilities of converged networks today. The rapid growth of Web conferencing has drawn attention to the communication potential of IP data networks, and given many IT shops experience and comfort with this class of application. Today, mature, flexible, software-based conferencing platforms that can also take advantage of the IP voice component of converged networks have arrived to take this application to the next level.

The economic benefits of Enterprise Conferencing applications running on converged networks are compelling:

Many companies today spend between $250-$350 per person each year on a combination of voice conferencing, Web conferencing, eLearning, marketing seminars and long distance calls into the conferencing bridges. Enterprise Conferencing solutions that consolidate these capabilities and leverage converged networks can cut these costs in half, and can replace wildly unpredictable per-minute charges and overage penalties with fixed price/unlimited usage business models. What enables this magnitude of cost reduction? For larger companies, those with 500 employees or more, IP-based software-only conferencing solutions make it dramatically simpler to bring conferencing completely or partially in-house, replacing per-minute service fees with fixed price software licenses. They eliminate the need for expensive, proprietary hardware-based conference bridges. And, they allow IT to consolidate multiple products into a single enterprise standard, with all the cost-of-ownership advantages that brings in the areas of support, training, and vendor negotiations. For smaller companies, these solutions allow service providers to offer conferencing applications as a hosted service at much lower cost.

If economics is the carrot, loss of control is the stick when it comes to deploying Enterprise Conferencing solutions sooner rather than later. Savvy IT managers are realizing that the longer they allow individual business units to keep using multiple point solutions, the harder it will be to standardize on a single enterprise-wide standard. Supporting half a dozen products and services across the company can make the Tower of Babel – or Boston’s Big Dig - look efficient! Hence the sense of urgency I see in CIO’s search for a company-wide solution.

Now that you see what Enterprise Conferencing can do for you, your converged network effort, and your business, I’ll provide you with the information you need to harness its benefits. In future “The VoIP of Reason” articles, I’ll answer those questions that are likely at the top of your list, including:

• What does my company need in terms of Enterprise Conferencing?
• What solutions out there today match my requirements?
• How do I build/analyze my business case?
• How do I navigate from today to tomorrow?
• How do I handle issues around capacity planning, QOS, integration, user adoption and change management?

Throughout this series, I’ll focus on the requirements of two different types of companies: a smaller company looking to use a hosted solution and a larger company looking to own its own Enterprise Conferencing solution. Stay tuned.