One infrastructure makes it simpler

Convergence puts everything—voice, video and data—on a single IP infrastructure. Faiz Askari reports

Though some people believe convergence to be the buzzword of tomorrow, the fact is most companies today are looking at having a converged network and making the maximum investments in this area. Be it the cash-strapped small and medium businesses sector or the funds-rich large enterprise segment, every company finds it easier and economical to put the all important voice, video and data on a single IP infrastructure.

"When voice and data travel over the same network, the need to maintain a separate telephone network disappears, that’s one of the advantages of a converged environment" - Ranajoy Punja Vice-President, Marketing, India & SAARC, Cisco

Ranajoy Punja, Vice-president, Marketing, Cisco Systems India & SAARC explains, “The last year saw the enterprise segment looking at networking and communication as a strategic investment. While the big enterprises invested in advanced networking services and solutions to drive greater efficiency, a buoyant economy and globalisation led to proliferation of networking in SMBs as well.”

He adds, “When voice and data travel over the same network, the need to maintain a separate telephone network disappears, that’s one of the advantages of a converged environment.”

States Yugal Sharma, Country Manager, India & SAARC, Polycom: “We believe that convergence will be the buzzword of tomorrow. We are focussing on driving the growth in collaboration technologies. Collaboration is today a competitive advantage. It is a mission-critical and strategic technology which provides corporate agility, greater productivity, faster time-to-market, and improved customer relationship in today’s geographically dispersed work environments.”

A truly converged conference solution has the capacity to seamlessly connect voice and video participants and is equipped with a common set of conference features and end-user interfaces. Sharma adds, “Such a conference will involve high level of shared conferencing features leading to robust voice-conferencing. Also, features with video interfaces must be supported by video end-points in a video or converged conference, to create a unified conferencing experience.”

V P Sharma, Head, Marketing, Sify informs, “We are witnessing a continuous upgradation of technology because of factors such as increased awareness and better availability and affordability to the end-user. But a technological tool like convergence requires an infrastructure and specific need of the end-user. Basically convergence is a deployment tool to make a comprehensive cost-effective solution.”

Infrastructure meets needs

Gartner and IDC predict that by 2009-10, companies in India would be considering IP to be the backbone of their business infrastructure. That will mean a huge opportunity in network convergence. Prasad Babu, Head, Systems Engineering, India & SAARC, Juniper believes, “Convergence is driven by two major components. One is infrastructure provided by the service provider and second is the need of the end-user. However, this requires some value-addition from the service providers and some basic factors like Internet accessibility through a computer or mobile for the users. Interestingly convergence is moving at a fast pace and has become a valuable market for players in the broadband, mobile and desktop segments in India. That is because of convergence of these applications. India is looking at this as a major market driver in near future.”

“This growth is expected because IP helps in bringing costs down. For instance, if you have a data network available at your company, you can utilise the same bandwidth to transport voice. Hence costs comes down drastically,” says Rajneesh Gupta, Director of Marketing, Tadiran Telecom India.

According to almost all the research firms, convergence of collaborative technologies is growing at a fast pace. They estimate that by 2009 the market for integrated collaborative applications will grow to an estimated $3.8 billion from $48 million in 2004. Frost & Sullivan projects the overall collaborative technology market will grow 12.6 percent annually from about $4.8 billion in 2004 to $9 billion in 2009.

However Prasad Babu of Juniper felt that there is a need to have a comprehensive study on the convergence market in India. He says, “The Indian market is at a critical stage, we need to have a reputed market research agency that can come out with some proper projections on the status of the convergence market. I think it is high time for such an initiative.”

Examples of convergence

Today in the Indian environment, telecom companies like Airtel offer one number for all their services. Thus all companies are trying to bring down the costs and increase volumes. Hence it is a benefit to use the existing IT network infrastructure and transporting voice over the same for business growth.

True convergence is essentially a convergence of the following three aspects which is possible through an IP NGN (Next Generation Network). These are:

Application Convergence: Enterprises can integrate new IP data, voice, and video applications over a single IP-based network infrastructure for increased profitability. Application convergence opens the doors to “all media services,” such as video-conferencing, which is effectively a new service that is not just voice, video, or data but an integration of all the three. Applications such as IP telephony and video-conferencing drive down the costs of communication.

Service Convergence: IP NGN makes a service available to end-users across any access network. For example, a service available in the office can be available over a wireless LAN, a broadband connection, or a cellular network. The enterprise will need to tie-up with a service provider for this. All of these access networks have the ability to transfer the service and the state of connection as the user roams, providing a seamless experience using the most efficient and cost-effective means possible. This kind of “service agility” drives greater productivity for enterprises.

Network Convergence: Creating a converged network is a goal that many service providers are already pursuing by their efforts to eliminate separate voice, video and data networks. Deploying a “many services, one network” model in which a single network can support all existing and new services will dramatically reduce the total cost of ownership for enterprises.

Growth drivers

"Government regulations have been a major bottleneck, which has been lately taken care of. Since then the VoIP sector has seen exponential growth" - N C Sunil Sr Manager Global Infrastructure Services CSC India

N C Sunil, Sr Manager, Global Infrastructure Services, CSC India believes, “Government regulations have been a major bottleneck, which has been lately taken care of. Since then the VoIP sector has seen exponential growth, both in commercial and technological terms.” Availability of audio, video, and Web-conferencing is possible at more locations.

The major growth drivers for this market in India are low costs, optimal usage of the network, improved quality as well as integration of voice and applications.

VoIP boom

The VoIP market in India is set for a boom. The overall enterprise telephony equipment market in APAC has grown 15 percent in 2005 compared to 2004 in terms of revenues. This increase is explained by the exceptional growth in the IP telephony market of 56 percent year-on-year. Traditional telephony declined by 2 percent this year.

Gupta of Tadiran says, “Voice over IP has great number of benefits. For instance, today all the major enterprises have their own data networks which are high speed. So they definitely benefit by going for VoIP for inter-office communication. Tadiran Telecom provides a system for the same. We give companies an IP address or an IP phone and we are able to connect them over VoIP.”

Sharma of Polycom explains, “The Indian IP telephony enterprise equipment market is finally emerging out of the shackles of government-enforced restrictions. The recent announcement on further opening up of IP telephony means that IP telephones and equipment will be able to freely interconnect with normal Time Division Multiplexing lines, be it for calling within the user’s closed group or outside, irrespective of whether the called party is outside or within India.

The biggest drivers for IP telephony among enterprises will be investment protection and convergence businesses which will look at investing in the latest technology that will give them the best returns in the long run. The enterprise segment is in the process of replacing traditional telephony equipment by IP telephony at a regional level. Companies are now buying new telephony equipment and in the years to come, they will more likely choose equipment that is at least IP-ready.

Analysts’ take

A study conducted by IDC revealed that sales of IP telephony equipment will overtake those of traditional equipment in the Asia-Pacific region in 2007. Countries that will have over 50 percent of IP revenues in 2007 include India, Philippines and Indonesia. Moreover by 2010, China and India will overtake Australia in IP telephony sales by a large percentage (64 percent & 15 percent respectively) and emerge as the most important markets for IP telephony equipment.

Single network

IP technology allows enterprises to invest in just a single communications pipe that will deliver voice and data communications to the enterprise desktop. In fact, the use of IP telephony to terminate voice traffic by enterprises is seen to be the market with maximum potential for the future. Savings also result through reduced support staffing using centralised call management across multi-site deployments.

Upcoming offerings

The industry is now gradually moving from group systems to desktop video-conferencing systems. Apart from large enterprises, SMBs are adopting video-conferencing solutions.

Sharma of Polycom says, “Enterprises today are looking forward to leading edge technology, flexible conferencing, easy deployment, common management suites, high scalability, secure VoIP-conferencing, embedded multipoint options and more in video-conferencing solutions. Video-conferencing therefore, spells power of integration, bringing in some inherent advantages. The system can be used for scheduled or ad hoc meetings and plays a crucial role in enhancing productivity. Accessing and sharing of information plays a vital role in corporate meetings.”

He adds, “Video-conferencing enables easy sharing of any type of information, instantly arming the participants with the required knowledge. This in the long run is important for swift analysis and decision-making, bringing products to the market and gaining an edge over competitors.”

Punja of Cisco says, “The future belongs to rich-media-conferencing solutions that seamlessly integrate voice, video, and Web-conferencing capabilities to make remote meetings as natural and effective as face-to-face meetings for unmatched productivity gains.”

Punja adds, “In a single step meeting organisers can schedule voice, video, and Web resources through the Web interface meeting. Invitees automatically receive notification by e-mail or calendar invitation and can attend rich-media conferences with a single click. Rescheduling meetings through the calendar automatically reschedules all the resources at the same time. This simple approach saves time and improves productivity.”

Web-conferencing

Small enterprises are gearing up to go global with the power of the Internet. Web-conferencing has emerged as a cost effective option for these businesses to communicate. “Usage of Internet to facilitate ‘virtual meetings’ for companies across all industry verticals is one of the most talked about technological trends. Business travel and telephone conference-call strategies are being rapidly being replaced by Web-conferencing,” says Punja.

He adds, “One of the other key drivers of growth of Web-conferencing is increased adoption of broadband for Internet connectivity in smaller towns. With government taking steps to provide Internet connectivity to these towns, demand for Web-based collaborative applications is expected to rise in the future.”

Gupta of Tadiran informs, “SMBs are also coming forward to adopt such equipment but in order to bill their software they need to have managed, secured data networks. They definitely benefit by using Web-conferencing or video-conferencing.”

He adds that Tadiran has incorporated the Session Initiation Protocol technology in all its products, so together with VoIP, you can even open your camera at one end and your picture can be transmitted over the network. IP technology permits all this today. All you need is to have IP capability at both ends.

Video-conferencing

The video-conferencing market is moving towards rich-media collaboration and video communication more than traditional room-based video-conferencing. Growing demand and greater acceptance for rich-media IP for voice and visual communication has enabled service providers and manufacturers to offer a variety of services and develop IP devices such as switches and gateway bridges.

“Criticality of maintaining a competitive edge in the global market space, is forcing firms to explore options for integrated seamless communication. This need for convergence of voice, video and data onto a single platform has increased the adoption of ‘conferencing technology’. As technology has evolved, the separate realms of audio and video conferencing have progressed to a holistic, visual medium of communication,” elaborates Punja.

Highlighting other important aspects of this market trend, he informed that the deployment of scalable, high-bandwidth networks today is driving the use of advanced applications such as IP telephony, video & Web-conferencing, and multipoint visual protocol. Apart from being cost-effective these applications are enhancing business productivity as well for the enterprises.

Sharma says, “In the past one year, there’s been a significant increase in adoption in the enterprise market. The other applications that are likely to grow in importance over the next one or two years are video-conferencing in the healthcare, education and government segments. As prices for hardware and bandwidth reduce and awareness on the technology increases this change will be visible. At present, most of the enterprises connect via ISDN. However, Internet-based connections are increasing in popularity and many conference facilities today are over IP network.”

Future scenario

Communication technologies and media are converging. The future is the sum of several independent innovations coming together. One network brings all types of information (voice, data, video) into the home, office, and industry.

Conferencing through electronic mail systems will increase. Special computer-conferencing programmes will be available to enhance cooperative writing projects. Using workstations, all participants will see the document simultaneously and can make changes. Video-conferencing can be used for training both staff and clientele. Many sites will have workstations that put audio, video, computer conferencing on every staff member’s desk.

Latest unified wired and wireless solutions incorporate advanced features that elevate a wireless deployment from a means of efficient data connectivity to a reliable, converged communications network for voice and data applications. They are comprehensive solutions encompassing both clients and infrastructure, solving the limitations of traditional WLANs while enabling management capabilities to efficiently deal with problems without overburdening corporate IT resources.