With the evolution of IP communications, who would have imagined that the infernal scourge of phone tag would continue to frustrate us? Well, unfortunately, it still does. While trying to reach a colleague for an important discussion, you discover that they are not available, prompting you to leave a voicemail message, which is unreturned, leading you to periodic retries, and the whole vicious cycle continually repeats itself. Of course, it would be much more useful if you could know exactly when (and perhaps by what communications mechanism) to reach out to that colleague without worrying about where they will be or what device or software they will use to respond. Such is the concept of seamless instant communications within a converged enterprise network.

 

Enterprises are continually moving towards the ideal convergence scenario, where real-time communications and collaboration between employees, suppliers, and customers can instantly be initiated on any device, at any location. However, the full potential of seamless instant communications within the enterprise is not fully realized just yet. While the enterprise infrastructure for converged and instant communications has been in place for a few years now, enterprise applications are disparate entities, analogous to “isolated islands in a large ocean.” Employees currently have a combination of a desk phone, a PC soft phone, an enterprise Instant Messaging (IM) client, a video conferencing client, a mobile phone and/or devices, and real-time collaboration tools; the key is to integrate these applications and technologies to provide the most seamless, productive, and cost-efficient instant communications for the enterprise.

 

But before we can describe the current state of disparate instant communications applications within the enterprise, we need to revisit how we got here. With the introduction of IP Telephony in the enterprise, IP communications technology (of which IP Telephony is just one aspect) had finally become a mainstream technology, not just an “academic” exercise. The subsequent proliferation of soft phones and instant messaging software within the enterprise, made it easier for employees to find and communicate with their colleagues due to the integration of the phones with the corporate directory. Over time, the integration of e-mail, voicemail, and other corporate systems with the IP Telephony systems gradually led to the first real concept of unified messaging. With additional Web services integration, immediate alert notifications and broadcasts to employees allowed corporate information to be rapidly disseminated to the staff members (to any device of their choosing). A fusion version of instant communications with the corporate systems was born.

 

What was really needed, though, was the ability for employees to instantly communicate with their colleagues. But being able to instantly communicate with a colleague required the ability to gauge that colleague’s current status and then determine whether that person is available for immediate communications; i.e., Presence. The solution was simple: Instant Messaging (IM). Soon, IM solutions began to make headway into the enterprise. Employees could instantly reach out to their colleagues with a simple text message. Moreover, they could ascertain whether that colleague was available for immediate communications, as employees had the ability to update their status according to their availability (or let the system automate the status updates as is currently done in many IM systems). The text message might lead to an immediate phone call, the joining of a conference call, or a quick answer to an important question. Unanswered calls, hoping the person was there, became a thing of the past, as did the whole process of voicemails, followed by more missed calls, followed by more voicemails, leading to endless frustrations. Even if large enterprises did not deploy the popular consumer-based IM systems (for security concerns), internal enterprise IM solutions were widely available.

 

However, this was just the beginning; we had only begun to scratch the surface. There were three key elements still missing: real-time instant communications and collaboration amongst groups of employees, instant communications with external contacts of the enterprise (e.g.., suppliers and customers), and finally seamlessly converging all the instant communications technologies onto any device and at any location.

 

Naturally, real-time instant communications and collaboration amongst groups of employees might induce skepticism, given that employees can now instantly communicate with individual team members. A typical question about instant group communications might be: “I already have a phone that allows me to instantly call any of my contacts and I use corporate IM to immediately communicate with any coworker. That already is instant communications. What does instant communications with a project team or other groups gain me?” The answer is simple: by providing services such as Push to Talk instant group conference or instant voice broadcasts of corporate or emergency announcements, instant group communications increases the productivity at the group level (e.g., project teams) by increasing the productivity of each individual member of that group on an aggregate level, while simultaneously reducing internal communications costs (e.g., long distance and international charges for conference calls are eliminated). Certainly, the elimination of the long group e-mail thread is the most tangible productivity increase befitting of instant group communications. A single e-mail thread that is discussed by a project team or a group of employees can possibly take up to one or two days to finish the discussion! Too much time spent on reading and replying to e-mails can actually decrease employee productivity. According to Ferris Research, “The average corporate e-mail user now spends almost two hours daily processing their email.” (Ferris Research survey, December, 1999) By providing instant group communications for its employees, an enterprise can reduce much of the time spent dealing with the long group e-mail threads. A member of the group can instantly reach out to the entire team and discuss any idea within a few minutes. This is not to say that there will be a day when no group e-mail threads are needed; however, in many situations, the ability to instantly communicate with the group will generate more time for other important tasks.

 

Moving beyond just internal instant communications would enable enterprises to quickly respond to customer inquiries, any customer support questions or issues from external suppliers and third-party vendors, or even any legal concerns concerning the enterprise. By vastly improving external response time, customer support (not to mention customer satisfaction) would be an invaluable asset of the enterprise. Employees could use their personal contact directories (e.g., Outlook) to instantly initiate multimedia communications instead of only having the possibility to call the same contact through an IP phone or send a quick text message via consumer IM applications. However, to fully achieve this level of instant communications, IP Peering and IP Multimedia System (IMS) technologies will have to be deployed across the Internet (via the carriers’ infrastructures) and all the corresponding enterprises, especially given the current state of Network Address Translation (NAT) devices and enterprise firewalls, which are highly selective in the types of IP traffic that is allowed to leave and enter the enterprise network.

 

But, most importantly, the key to seamless instant communications within the enterprise is when the employees will have the ability to instantly communicate and collaborate with anyone or any group in their contacts, via any software and/or any device, from anywhere in the world (including remote locations). This implies the ability to instantly communicate with a project team from a mobile device, dial in an external supplier, and instantly switch the entire multimedia session to their voice and document collaboration software, all with the push of three buttons. This is where true converged technologies, from both an enterprise infrastructure and an application perspective, will bring seamless instant communications to the enterprise. Employees will no longer have to worry about handling multiple devices — PC and handheld software, and internal and external contact systems — when trying to do their daily tasks in the most efficient and timely manner, and it will help to reduce travel costs and lost travel time. Among the last few remaining technical hurdles to overcome would be to integrate WiFi networks and technologies, along with Fixed Mobile Convergence (News - Alert) (FMC) solutions, into the enterprise network. And then, and only then, will truly seamless instant communications within the enterprise, with all its benefits, finally be realized.

 

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