Session Border Controller Featured Article

October 04, 2012


Sonus Explains How to Unify Unified Communications


By Rich Steeves
TMCnet Web Editor

Every company wants to increase productivity and get their business working smarter, faster and more collaboratively. During a keynote speech at ITEXPO (News - Alert) Austin 2012, Ray Dolan, president and CEO of Sonus, spoke about how to reach these goals by unifying unified communications.


Dolan opened his speech by speaking about the history of mobile data and how 25 years ago the market was unsure just how many millions of wireless users there would be in the world. Early in the birth of the mobile industry, companies focused on moving voice -- which was so important to business – into the mobile space. The mobile industry then moved to focusing on data, but the industry had to wait until people got used to the Internet and they had the desire to access the Internet from their mobile phones. In the early days, people were unsure whether consumers would want to access the Internet from their mobile phones. This journey speaks about the path of innovation and how the UC space will reflect previous technology journeys, paralleling the way the mobile industry was birthed from competing providers to a more unified experience.

He quoted a statistic that knowledge workers spend half their working day on routine communications, often leaving messages in more than one form factor. Dolan wants to see unification here, stating that nearly one in six projects are delayed because of impeded access to decision makers. This raises the question as to why communications are not yet unified.

There are, said Dolan, four trends that shape the market: new media, BYOD, big data and the cloud. These forces impact the UC industry, and Dolan sees Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert) (SIP) as the technology that will define the future. People across the world are deploying SIP, with early adopters looking to SIP for cost savings. The future will allow us to move all of our communications and data to the cloud, keeping us connected at all times with UC.

The value proposition will then move from cost-savings to productivity improvement. Dolan gave several examples including a U.S. bank that adopted a mixed PBX (News - Alert) system and ended up seeing a productivity improvement. He also identified a similar path for a top U.S. airline and a top U.S. retailer. These companies realized savings from $1.5 to $30 million.

With session border controllers, these companies can scale their SIP communications. They will provide scalability, flexibility, reliability and simplicity. Dolan showed some pretty startling statistics illustrating the scaling that results from the explosion of communications. Scale and networking matter more than ever.

Flexibility is important as well. It is important in relation to applications but also in regards to federation. Federating out to the customer base and supply chain makes matters complicated, and we need to be able to work with companies that provide access to every member of the supply chain. This will require flexibility.

Research indicates that the priorities of CIOs are changing rapidly. BYOD is an example of this, and CIOs need a flexible, scalable architecture to meet the needs of an increasingly mobile world. SIP will provide this.

Sonus provides a wide range of session border controller products, all of which are Lync-certified and are suited to businesses of any size. Its Session Border Controllers for Dummies publication explains these concepts in more detail.

To find out more about Platinum Sponsor Sonus Networks (News - Alert), visit the company at ITEXPO Austin, currently in progress at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, TX. Visit Sonus in booth # 901. For more information on ITEXPO, click here.




Edited by Jamie Epstein

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