5th September 2011
In the second and final part of his analysis into the unified communications (UC) market, Actel Consulting’s Shervin Bakhtiari discusses what the challenges for moving UC to the cloud are, both for the market and those adopting the technology. Is security likely to be the biggest issue in switching the UC platform to the cloud? And what will providers and hosts need to do to ensure the technology can actually cope with external software delivery? Part two explains all.
By Shervin Bakhtiari, Actel Consulting
In the first part of my analysis last week, I touched upon why unified communication adoption was becoming increasingly popular in small businesses, with a look at some of the emerging features (including cloud computing) and market trends. Today I want to get a little more technical, investigating how this type of UC delivery is going to be made possible, and what the potential issues are likely to be.
Firstly though, I want to touch upon the importance of mobile. Much has been made of the smartphone’s influence on computing, and there’s no doubt mobile is now affecting how we think of unified communications.
While more commonly associated with the consumer market due to the inconsistencies of 3G, the launch of 4G/LTE networks is now allowing mobile networks the QoS and priority routing capabilities to provide business-suitable voice quality. It is almost certain mobile VoIP will become more widely used in the enterprise as a result; and this is something service providers will have to take into consideration.
Designed for the Cloud
Beyond this set of end-user facing features, service providers will also need to select solutions which, while providing native multi-tenancy, also provide an integrated deployment architecture providing a single provisioning and management interface (and APIs) for the whole solution, as well as single point of billing and charging records.
One important provisioning aspect for the customers will be the ability to tailor different set of features and functions for different type of users (e.g. frequent traveller vs. an in office employee) as well as the ability to dynamically request additional users or new features – for example extra contact centre agents during a holiday shopping season.
The ability to provide a true elastic and scalable solution for the customers relies in the ability to dynamically increase the capacity of the whole system, end to end, not just computing or storage. For example, if the UC platform is running on an elastic infrastructure, but the session border controllers (SBC), or the voice &video conference bridge (MCU / Media Servers) are proprietary fixed-sized hardware then the solution has non-elastic bottlenecks.
To resolve such limitations, new UC solutions are moving towards software-based components - MCU, SBC, etc. - either built-in or closely integrated third party solutions, which can be deployed on elastic computing platforms for more dynamic scalability.
However, technology is only part of the consideration; the business model and pricing models of such components, as well as the UC platform itself, needs to be such that capacity is not limited upfront artificially by license limits, but can be increased on demand and paid for based on total transactions or new level of capacity. Such features, flexible design, and business models is what would differentiate the platform as a true cloud platform as oppose to the traditionally managed service or hosted voice and UC platforms.
Needless to say, carrier-grade functionality such as load balancing, high availability and auto fail-over and data replication are basic requirements for any service provider deployments and are required to ensure uninterrupted service to the customers.
Challenges
As with many cloud services, but especially with real time applications, challenges in bandwidth and latency need to be considered. Video, voice, and collaboration sessions are susceptible to jitter and network latency and can greatly degrade the customer experience. From a technology perspective, service providers should use more adaptive and scalable codecs, which can adjust the coding to the performance and limitation of the network.
For example, utilizing H.264 SVC (Scalable Video coding) codec allows each endpoint to adapt the video quality to its operation environment, including network, screen, and hardware capabilities.
From an operations perspective, the service providers who have control over the whole or most of the end-to-end network, have an advantage here whereby they can bundle and upsell additional network bandwidth and/or QoS along with the UC service hence increase their ARPU. OTT players will need to pay extra attention to this issue and guide their customers in obtaining appropriate network services. Of course, local “net neutrality” and regulatory environment need to be evaluated prior to such a deployment.
Security is another important aspect for any cloud service and for the voice and UC services, encryption of both signaling, as well as the media (voice, video, messaging, web) may be necessary to meet the security requirements of the customer. A certain amount of customer education will be necessary to explain security measures as well as dispel any security misconception or misunderstandings.
Federation and interconnectivity with other UC solutions is another important topic in both the Cloud and on-premise UC market today. The ability to discover and exchange presence status and IM or interconnect video conferencing sessions with other UC systems, enterprise or consumer, would create a true inter-domain communication network allowing the users to communicate more effectively with their customers, partners, suppliers, etc.
In order to maximise the network effect, a UC solution is impacted by the number of others using it – such interconnectivity can significantly increase the value and importance of UC solutions as a business and productivity tool.
However, challenges exist today with many different implementations and pseudo-standards for federation, but there is industry activity to drive standards as well as developing federation solutions such as federation gateways and federation cloud services providing such interconnectivity. It will take some time to have a true set of standards as well as security and operation models that can fully address the many different UC solutions in the market. This is an area where vendors and service providers need to cooperate and drive toward commercial reality.
Summary
The cloud-based UC market is growing and expanding rapidly as many different types of service providers are looking to enhance their value added service portfolio and boost customer loyalty and stickiness. The SME market segment stands to benefit greatly from such cloud services as it allows it to cost effectively utilise more comprehensive solutions previously only affordable to large enterprises.
However, the users’ expectation of application usability and feature set has greatly increased; therefore the new generation of UC solutions needs to address user demands for always available, multi-device, multi-network, mobile and user-centric solutions. Furthermore, a rethinking of the design and architecture of the UC platform is required to create a true cloud solution with integrated multi-tenancy, security, elasticity, and operations capabilities.
Service providers need to address, early on, issues such as network bandwidth, security, and customer education to ensure customer satisfaction. As well, service providers need to be mindful of new requirements and expectations such as federation and inter-domain connectivity. They also need to incentivise and work with vendors to ensure product evolution and roadmaps are aligned with their customers’ needs.
Shervin Bakhtiari is a multi-disciplinary ICT professional and evangelist with fifteen years of experience driving emerging technology evaluation and adoption for a wide variety of customers and clients including Telco/Mobile, enterprise verticals such as financials, as well as angel & venture investments. He currently holds the position of Principal Consultant with Actel Consulting, a leading specialist strategy and technology consulting firm.
Related stories: Guest post: UC in the Cloud (part 1)
Tags: unified communications | mobile cloud
