Tag Archives: Lync

Adding VoIP to your network – some things you need to know

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Hi again,

The feedback from my last post was great thank you. I also got a nice request from New Zealand to cover the perils of introducing VoIP on the LAN, since I gave so much coverage to implementing VoIP on a traditional LAN. Thank you, IT Manager in New Zealand, and here goes.

I’m going to start with a few definitions and clarifications (Warning: Technical Content).VoIP is made up of two components: Signalling/Control traffic and CODEC. The first establishes the call whilst the CODEC (or COder/DECoder) converts speech to digital media and vice-versa.

<start very technical bit – skip if you want to>

When I say VoIP, I mean SIP and G.711/G.729. Originally, VoIP meant either proprietary technology or a very loose standard called H.323. Proprietary technologies obviously meant that you needed a homogenous telephony environment (unless you implemented digital bridging with DPNSS or QSIG but that’s far deeper than I intend to go with this post); H.323 was designed to bring some conformity to VoIP but it was such a loose standard that vendors still often couldn’t interact. Tech example (thanks again Andrew): Cisco H.323 used short preamble for call establishment, Ericsson used long preamble and neither were configurable so they could never call each other.

SIP (for Session Initiated Protocol) is a signalling protocol; it’s job is to establish a call between point “a” and point “b”; it is deliberately rigid in order to prevent the issues with H.323. Virtually every IP-PABX supports SIP, and virtually every IP-PABX can talk SIP to every other IP.PABX. This solved the interoperability problem but created a new one: features. Most of the “cooler” features on PABXs (IP or otherwise) are somewhat proprietary to its vendor. SIP is the lowest common denominator, and designed to mimic the features of the carrier-facing end of a traditional digital PABX. This means that things like call-camping, conference calls, multi-party calls (beyond 3 parties for the purists) aren’t part of the protocol. Vendors had two ways of dealing with this: Server-based control (e.g. IPFX, Asterisk, etc.) or proprietary signalling (e.g. Mitel, Avaya, etc.). Both still use SIP, but they use other technology in order to extend beyond what SIP offers. My personal preference is for proprietary signalling as this doesn’t require a dependency on a File Server (that’s another topic). Both work very well though.

G.711 is a CODEC (or audio COMPANDing protocol for the purist COMPress/expAND protocol) which actually carries voice or “the media”. G.711 is not new, it’s been around as long as I have (i.e. since 1972) and has been ubiquitous for telephony since the introduction of Digital voice. Pretty much all IP (and digital for that matter) PABXs support G.711. G.711 utilises 64Kbps of bandwidth. G.729 is a compression technology designed to reduce the network load of G.711 ; it can drop the bandwidth cost down to 8Kbps but at a cost of voice quality; it’s still available but largely irrelevant in these days of fat WAN links.

<end very technical bit – read on>

When you choose to implement VoIP, there are two key considerations: Quality and Security; if you are implementing SIP carriage or connecting to a WAN, there are two more that are equally important: Routing and Bandwidth. I’m going to leave the challenges of VoIP over WANs to another post.

Quality of Service (QoS) is probably the biggest issue I have encountered with VoIP is QoS. The problem with VoIP is that in some ways it sounds too easy. A typical VoIP session (comprising of signalling + CODEC) is around 100Kbps (each vendor is slightly different here) which seems insignificant when you have a 100Mbps or GbE. Even 20 concurrent calls still only needs about 2Mbps! That thinking – along with network (or voice) engineers that just don’t understand VoIP (see my post http://dancingbear.com.au/2012/02/10/if-you-want-to-succeed-with-microsoft-lync-learn-telephony/ for more on this) – is why so many VoIP projects fail and to my mind is unforgivable since QoS on a LAN is a trivial task. I won’t go all technical again but to use an analogy: common Ethernet without QoS means that he who has the biggest hammer (i.e. demands the most bandwidth) wins the fight. A 200MB File Copy is a Jackhammer vs. the tack-hammer that a VoIP session wields. The file copy will completely lock a network segment for just a few seconds which may be irrelevant to most other programs but is an extremely long interruption for a VoIP call (acceptable delay for VoIP is only 150ms).

I’m only going to cover QoS for IP handsets in this post, which is what most people expect when they talk about commercial VoIP. QoS for soft-phones (including MS Lync, Skype or those supplied by various vendors) will be covered when I talk about VoIP over WAN since the requirements are similar.

Setting up QoS for IP handsets is generally quite straightforward; it mainly requires that you have the right network switches (i.e. switches that support 802.1q VLANs and 802.1p QoS). All that it really takes is to separate your voice and data traffic into different VLANs and to prioritise the Voice VLAN. That’s it, you’ve implemented VoIP successfully and you will have clear calls! Well, that’s not quite it, there are other things to configure like discovery protocols, dhcp and routing but they are either trivial (switchport voice vlan <x> on Cisco, equally straightforward for other switch vendors, routine (most data people can set up DHCP in their sleep) or both (unless you have a massive campus with thousands of nodes, LAN routing is trivial and routine).

The next consideration for VoIP is security. On older Digital PABXs, security was ensured through it being a closed system. Each handset connected directly to the PABX and unless you could get access to the wiring cabinets (IDFs and MDFs) or the carriage in the street, there was little you could do to listen in on a phone call. VoIP exists on a network, which can be accessed from virtually anywhere, and neither SIP nor G.711 support encryption. This makes VoIP far either to listen into (or snoop), given the right tools and technology which makes it vulnerable. This is where your choice of PABX vendor is very important, and is another reason why I endorse the use of proprietary signalling over server-based systems. Most of these systems support encryption of VoIP calls (generally using a very strong encryption like AES) which makes snooping virtually impossible. I give props to Mitel here for being the first vendor to have strong encryption turned on by default. If you care at all about the confidentiality of your voice traffic, then implementing a system that supports encryption is a must. A side-note here, Microsoft Lync (and its predecessor OCS) require encryption to be deployed, using certificates. This makes them a bit more complex to install but ensures that they are rock-solid secure (which gets my vote for a good architecture).

 

That’s all there really is to it. Get decent switches, set up VLANs and QoS and make sure you have the right security and your VoIP will be pretty much perfect. I realise this post is a bit shorter than typical for me but I’m a little tired tonight. I might revise or expand it in the future (as well as cover some of the other topics I’ve mentioned above) and of course I’m happy to field any questions anyone might have but that’s all for now.

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Migrating to the cloud – Small Business

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This is probably a bit out of order since I should cover some foundation information first but I know a few of my readers are most interested in this part of the series so I figured I would start here first.

As a general definition, I classify Small Business as an organisation with less than 100 people who generally don’t have any full-time IT staff.

I’m going to put a Mantra here that I will probably repeat every post in this series:

Cloud Computing is not about saving money! Cloud Computing is about improving business efficiency which will allow you to make more money!

The Cloud, or Cloud Applications are probably of most immediate interest to Small Business. Move everything to the cloud and stop worrying about having to buy a “Server” (whatever that is) every 5 years, or to pay the IT Guy 300 bucks every time he has to fiddle with something! Won’t have to change those damned tapes we pay $100 each for and don’t do anything! Yada Yada Yada.

Unfortunately, what most small businesses think they understand about Cloud Computing is utterly and completely wrong. This is pretty much what the majority of small businesses understand about most aspects of ICT which is one of the reasons they can often be so hard to deal with. I’m going to digress and use an analogy a friend told me years ago. He was a former electrician, he gave it up in frustration about customers complaining to him about home much he charged. They didn’t care that he had to crawl under the house or into roof cavities full of insects or other pests. He had to drill through double brick and then re-fill the holes. All they saw was a power point on the wall that cost them $500 to install. ICT in small business is a lot like that; many small businesses do not understand the time or effort it takes to keep things working so they can continue to do business. To them, cloud computing offers a way to get out of paying for people to look after their infrastructure. To be fair, a lot of marketing material promotes this ideal. The reality in unfortunately far less utopian.

There is one thing every small business needs to understand about Cloud Providers. They don’t care about you! They only care about your money!! I’m sure some idealistic Cloud Service offerings may initially have their customers’ best interests at heart, but if they try to provide the sort of personalised customer service that most small businesses expect to receive, they will quickly find themselves out of business. To make offering Cloud Services to small businesses worthwhile requires that they attract a lot of customers. When you have a lot of customers, the most expensive part of your business stops being equipment and facilities and starts being human resources; particularly customer support. Because of this, you will still need to rely on your IT support people to both look after your internal systems as well as to interact with your Cloud Service Provider.

Small businesses generally only have the option to go S-cloud (see my intro post for definitions). The only way cloud providers can offer them economies of scale is to bundle their infrastructure along with a lot of other clients’. This unfortunately leads to the biggest issue with S-cloud which is lack of flexibility! When you start sharing infrastructure with a bunch of other people, that starts limiting what you can use that infrastructure for, and that’s where things start to come unglued for small business. Here are some of the reasons:

  • There are very few types of business that don’t run some type (or often multiple types) of industry-specific software. It could be inventory management, it could be diagnostics; it could be almost anything. The odds are that you will not be able to efficiently take those applications to The Cloud. This means you will still need a File Server and still need someone to provide support (in fact you will always need someone to provide support). Now The Cloud can only deliver some applications.
  • When you move any part of your business to The Cloud, you will have to take your company Internet link(s) far more seriously. You’ll have to say goodbye to that $50/month ADSL link and invest in some serious bandwidth. If you put in anything less than around 10Mbps (which will generally cost around $500-1000/month in Australia), your user experience is going to plummet. In a localised environment, just about the only “real-time” traffic that uses The Internet is web-browsing and even much of this isn’t really real-time as web browsers can compensate for delay fairly well. Any application that is delivered via The Cloud is completely real-time which means if you don’t have a decent Internet link (I’m keeping things simple here and not going in to private networks for now), the performance of those applications is going to be dreadful. They may be “thin apps” (look it up if you don’t know what that means) but you can still only squeeze a certain amount of toothpaste out of the tube through a tiny nozzle. Now The Cloud means I have to pay more for my Internet link.
  • Probably one of the biggest attractions of The Cloud to small business is Voice. Not having to replace an expensive PABX, and being able to consolidate all their branch offices into a centralised number range and not pay for calls between them in return for a “reasonable” ongoing fee can grab attention. Unfortunately, Voice is currently probably the worst application generally delivered through The Cloud (though this is starting to improve). Most “Cloud Voice” solutions are delivered through a mechanism called “tenanting” where a centralised PABX is carved up to be delivered to multiple clients. This technology was originally developed for Serviced/Virtual offices and is very good for that. Unfortunately, a tenanted systems lacks a few key features that can be disastrous to any business. Possibly the most insidious issue is the losing the ability to “night switch” the PABX. For those who don’t understand telephony, a PABX generally has 3 modes: Day, Night1 and Night2 and they are critical to most organisations. Night Switching a PABX (which can be automatic or manual) is the mechanism used to globally change the behaviour of the system. Night1 is normally used for the “Thank you for calling XYZ co. Our office is currently closed…”. Night2 is used for special events (e.g. public holidays). Losing this feature is not an option for small business. The other thing you lose with a tenanted system is the ability to deploy a proper Reception Console which – despite what a lot of people thing – is still used for high-volume call intake at the majority of businesses (you also lose call centre capability…). Try giving a receptionist a standard phone and then start running while she looks for her shotgun. There are a lot of other issues prevalent in many “Cloud Voice” system but I’ll stop there. incidentally, when you amortise the cost of Cloud Voice against what you can get a local system for, you generally end up paying much more (gotta love those 3-5 year contracts!). Now The Cloud gives me expensive, crappy phones.

Those are some of the issues with small business moving to The Cloud. Now let’s consider some of the positives when it is done right:

Firstly, don’t expect to pay your IT support people any less (and IT support people, don’t expect to be out of a job). They will be just as necessary (if not more so) to keep things going.

The right solution for small business (and indeed for most businesses) is a Hybrid-Cloud environment. Many applications can move to The Cloud but others need to stay behind. The following should always be in The Cloud:

  • General business applications (MS-Office, most major accounting software, etc.)
  • Data storage (more on this in a bit) including backup
  • Remote Access/VPN
  • Email
  • Intranet

The following applications should never be in the cloud:

  • Any application that requires local, direct input/output (i.e. from a scanner, plant equipment, etc.)
  • Desktop Antivirus (although you must make sure your Cloud provider includes antivirus protection a well)
  • Any heavy graphic applications (CAD, Desktop Publishing, video production, etc.)
  • Any customised business application

Some of the above is probably fairly obvious but lists can be helpful when deciding where to put what. I’ll cover a few of the above points in more detail:

Data Storage is probably the single most important and beneficial aspect of Cloud Computing. An organisation’s data is its lifeblood, and local backups are generally slow, tedious, expensive and often unreliable. I doubt I’ve ever encountered a business over 5 years old that hasn’t encountered some amount of data loss in their past. Cloud Storage is relatively inexpensive and extremely reliable and portable. An example of this (which I’ve seen many businesses use) is something like DropBox (unsolicited plug for an awesome product: www.dropbox.com). Dropbox maintains replicas of your data both locally and in The Cloud and is extremely good at keeping it synchronised. This means your local and remote applications can access your data equally efficiently. It also means that mobile workers can have all or – more often – a subset of their data replicated to their laptop and even allow them to access it on most tablet or smart-phone devices. Properly set up – usually with 3rd party encryption tools for added security – Cloud Storage is virtually impossible to lose. A business owner can even keep a replica at home for virtually no cost if they so choose to be completely certain of its protection. A service like DropBox with 50GB of online storage and unlimited deletion recovery costs about $135 a year. There are business-focussed services that cost only slightly more making this the most inexpensive Cloud application as well as the most important. Now The Cloud can offer me almost 100% data protection

One of the biggest advances in Cloud Technology is the delivery of applications. Microsoft, Citrix, VMWare and others have all made huge strides in making applications available securely via Web Browser, which allows them to be accessed virtually everywhere. Being able to look up stock while on the beach, or edit a document while at the airport (and have it immediately available to colleagues) are effortless benefits of Cloud-based applications. Through Cloud and/or web delivery, user platform becomes far less relevant as the actual application processing happens at the Service Provider end (so you can do an MYOB query or fully edit an Excel Spreadsheet on your I-Pad for example). This offers a tremendous increase in flexibility and mobility without the huge costs that used to be associated with running this technology in-house. Now The Cloud allows me to access my business applications from literally anywhere

Whilst I touched on the negative aspects of Cloud-based telephony earlier on, that was mainly to highlight the many shoddy services still being offered (which many businesses are now stuck in contracts with). Done right, Cloud Voice or – more appropriately – Cloud Unified Communications can offer tremendous benefits to any organisation. Users can be given a single-point of contact that can follow them anywhere (to their mobile, to their home, to their hotel room, etc. – for more information on where this is going see my earlier post: http://michaelgwolff.wordpress.com/2012/02/04/microsoft-lync-get-used-to-it-get-used-to-loving-it-because-if-you-are-in-business-you-will-be-running-it-soon/) for virtually no additional cost. With the “right” cloud offering, users of even very small businesses can be granted access to all the features normally reserved for large companies (e.g. video conferencing and collaboration, teleworking, large conference bridges, etc.) without having to give up the most important features detailed above. In my experience, the best Cloud Voice offerings are built on either Mitel technology or Microsoft Lync/Exchange. Now The Cloud allows me to have every UC feature imaginable.

The Cloud is the right direction for the majority of small businesses. The move to The Cloud needs to be made for the right reasons though, and the right 3rd party advice should be sought regarding the suitability of such a move. Businesses that take advantage of The Cloud will find their environment to be far more secure and flexible; and their users being granted far more flexibility. I’m going to write about to look for in a Cloud provider in a later post but as a general rule if your current IT support company/advisor tells you to not move to The Cloud or to move everything to The Cloud, speak to someone else since they probably don’t know what they are talking about.

Michael

 

Note: This is a very complicated topic. Each post is somewhat relevant to all the others and I am writing them one at a time so expect some revisions to come as I develop and refine things further

 

Migrating to the cloud – introduction

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Hi all,

Based on the feedback I’ve received, it seems most people would like to know my opinion as to why businesses haven’t taken up cloud services anywhere nearly as quickly as most analysts have predicted. This is despite the fact that most cloud solutions offers big increases in ICT efficiency and flexibility whilst promising a very rapid ROI. In my opinion, there are numerous reasons for this; and the reasons are different depending both on the type of Cloud application or service and the type or size of business.

Over my next few entries, I’m going to examine some of these reasons and maybe help provide some road map assistance for organisations that are struggling to make this transition. I’m going to try and cover off the following broad topics (in no particular order) at the very least:

  • Small Business
  • Large Business
  • Hosted VoIP/Unified Communications
  • Security Concerns
  • Design Constraints
  • Transition issues (probably the most important topic)
  • Migration issues
  • Disaster Mitigation (another important topic)
  • Choosing a cloud provider

If you have other topics you would like me to cover, please let me know and I’ll try my best.

For now, I’ll start with some basic definitions. One of the biggest general constraints of “Cloud Computing” is that few people in the industry can actually agree on what the term actually means. Rather than weigh in on the ongoing debate, I’ll offer the following general definition: Cloud Computing is a state where applications and data have become fully abstracted from the hardware upon which they reside. In other words, a true “cloud” offering must be completely portable with minimal effort, and freely (and securely) accessible from virtually any public network location.

A few other definitions I’ll add (as I will  be using these terms in my following posts):

  • I-Cloud – a cloud environment that exists completed within an organisation’s premises or controlled infrastructure
  • E-Cloud – a cloud environment that exists outside an organisation’s premises or controlled infrastructure but who’s components are dedicated solely to that organisation’s use (managed by a 3rd party)
  • S-cloud – a cloud environment that exists outside an organisation’s premises or controlled infrastructure who’s components are shared with other organisations (managed by a 3rd party)
  • P-cloud – a cloud environment that exists outside an organisation’s premises or controlled infrastructure who’s components are shared with other organisations (managed by multiple 3rd parties)

I hope you find this series interesting and look forward to your comments.

Michael

If you want to succeed with Microsoft Lync – learn telephony!!

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I was lucky enough to move from a career in pure data (mainly servers, messaging and networking) to an organisation that was – up until my joining them – 100% focused on telephony just at the time when VoIP was beginning to become fashionable and the term “Unified Communications” hadn’t yet been coined.

I was luckier still to be given the opportunity to transform that business into a true UC business (rather than becoming the typical voice business with the “data guy” or data business with the “voice partner”) helping build a multi-skilled sales and engineering team.

Probably the most important thing I took away from that experience was that “data people” do not understand voice/PABX technologies. This is a problem that I continue to observe today and is one of the things holding products like MS Lync back in many markets. Engineers that may be MS-Superstars and understand Lync inside out simply do not understand the business logic necessary to put together a replacement for a traditional telephony environment and they can’t understand why their customers aren’t impressed with the results.

Around 5 years ago I attended Microsoft’s excellent Microsoft OCS Voice Ignite! training roadshow which involved 5 days of super hardcore product training, targeted specifically at the VoIP features of the product. By the end of it, I could make OCS sing and dance but I still couldn’t slot it in place of a PABX. Sitting next to me was a PABX engineer with nearly 15 years experience who made the conscious decision to learn the data side of the business and who is one of the best (and few) true UC engineers I know. The insights he gave me during the training program made me understand that for a data expert to learn voice was similar to an Australian learning Japanese. Not only is the language different, but so is the complete logic of the system and until you learn that logic, you will never succeed with the technology.

Data systems are linear and logical. An email system is designed to send emails, regardless of whether it is Exchange, SMTPd, Lotus Notes or any other system; a File Server stores files, a database collates data. Voice Systems are multi-functional, and each user will likely have a different idea of what they need the system to do and the best way of doing it. Totally different logic.

IVR trees, Call Routing, Hunt Groups, Ring Groups, Pickup Groups, Paging Groups, PRI, BRI, Analog, DPNSS trunks, Voicemail, Call Recording, Speed Dials, E911….literally hundreds of features need to be taken into account when setting up a PABX and the exact same things (and more) need to be understood if you want to convince an organisation to move from their traditional PABX to a Lync-based system. If you don’t understand the language and the logic, you can’t deliver the right solution.

I had my colleague’s influence first which led me to get certified as a PABX engineer and carry out a dozen or so deployments myself. If you want to truly succeed, I strongly urge you to take a similar path. Failing that, buy an old PABX (analogue, digital or VoIP will do, most of their functions are nearly identical) with handsets included off Ebay or similar, fire it up and see how it all hangs together. If you are lucky, it will include the old configurations so you can see the sorts of things a normal PABX client wants in their system. Spend enough time doing this and try and replicate each function and feature on MS Lync in a lab environment. If you can accomplish this, you will truly be a Lync expert and be ready to offer the full PABX alternative.

Microsoft Lync – Get used to it, get used to loving it because if you are in business, you will be running it soon

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Unified Communications has been a passion of mine for over a decade. I left a senior position at Australia’s largest carrier in order to become a minor partner in what was to become one of Australia’s first truly UC-focussed businesses. Flash forward to around 2004 when we got involved in a tender for the complete Voice and Data fit-out of the NSW Institute of Sports (where the likes of Ian Thorpe and Louise Sauvage trained) who were building their new purpose-designed facilities at Sydney Olympic Park. Up to that point, I had primarily relied on voice-vendor supplied UC solutions so it was with some trepidation that I learned that they were really keen on this relatively new Microsoft UC solution called “Live Communication Server”. Whilst a huge fan of Microsoft in general – Windows Server (in all its iterations since 3.1 beta) and MS Messaging (since MS-Mail v1.3) had been my bread and butter throughout the 90s but every encounter I had up to that point of any sort of Voice solution on MS Servers had ranged from terrible to catastrophic. That was until I met Oscar Trimboli (he is the guru of all things Microsoft business related in Australia – look him up!) who was the then head of the local MS-UC business and he gave me a deep-dive into the product and helped me see how it would interact with our chosen Voice and Networking platforms.

Still, we were up against 6 or 7 other tender respondents all of whom represented far more vendor-centric and “mature” solutions than what we proposed. It turns out we won the tender and ended up deploying the first ever fully voice-integrated MS UC solution in Australia. It also made me a complete convert to Microsoft UC (and UM since the release of Exchange 2007), which has been one of my  favorite technologies ever since. I spent the next several years banging out LCS, OCS and OCS R2 solutions for organisations large and small but always with Microsoft as the product supplicant to someone else’s VoIP.

Suddenly we have Microsoft Lync, where Microsoft decided to change the game. Where the previous UC products – whilst amazingly versatile – felt somewhat raw and unfinished, Lync was released as a smoothly polished total package. Coming on the  heels of MS Exchange 2010 – which includes a more powerful and veratile Voicemail engine than most commercial IP PABX vendors offer (at a fraction of their price) and Microsoft was suddenly a forefront player (pardon the pun) in the voice game. Lync is secure – far more secure than the vast majority of IP PABXs which still transmit voice without encryption – straightforward to deploy, highly reliable and virtually infinitely scalable. Unlike previous versions, there are now powerful Receptionist, Call Recording and Contact Center products integrated with (or available for) it. What’s more – and this is certainly a strategic move on Microsoft’s part – they put the focus on a person’s identity as being most important rather than something as nebulous as their phone number (more on this later). Having recently released well-featured client software for most current SmartPhones and the first half of their establishment is now complete.

The second half is far more subtle and far-reaching. Being “yesterday’s news”, a lot of people have already forgotten that Microsoft purchased Skype last year and that the transfer of ownership was completed in November last year. Think about that for a moment…Microsoft – the organisation whose products are used by the vast bulk of businesses globally now owns possibly the world’s best known pure IP Telephony network with points of presence in virtually every major country (and certainly every major business country). They also now own perhaps the most robust and clear voice CODEC (COder/DECoder) in the world (Cisco was licensing Skype’s CODEC for their Teleworker product for years, if they are still doing so I hope they are being very nice to their friends at MS) and a pretty decent multi-person Video Conferencing engine (one of Microsoft’s few weaknesses in UC was the “one-to-many” model of Live Meeting was always more suited to lectures and presentations than to multi-party collaborative meetings).

So now the world’s largest software company  – who has been pouring development dollars into their UC and UM product suites – is one of the world’s largest VoIP-based voice carriers. From my previous post, you already know my predictions that virtually every business will be moving to VoIP over the next few years (not really a prediction since its mostly occurred already) but what I didn’t mention is that most Voice Carriers are starting to offer VoIP trunks (technically called SIP trunks) in lieu of traditional digital trunks (they actually been doing this for years since SIP exchanges are far cheaper than Digital exchanges but they’ve been “black-box” converting back to Digital on the customer premises before presenting it to the PABX) which means that customers can get by without any traditional Voice links and run everything via their data links. A large part of this has been in necessary response to a number of IP PABX vendors certifying their equipment for use with pure SIP carriers (such as MyNetPhone or Skype). Microsoft now has a full-blown pure-software UC system which many organisations already own the licenses to use (through their MS-Select/EA/SBS agreements) along with one of the most trusted and least costly carriage services in the world (here in Australia, it costs only about $72 per year for unlimited land-line calls nationally or about double that for unlimited global land-line calls; most carriers charge that much per month!). How long will it be before they start bundling in carriage as part of those aforementioned Select/EA/SBS agreements? How many businesses will turn their backs on having their Telephony costs slashed to a fraction of their current costs?

What about mobiles? Skype costs a fortune to connect to mobiles! Your whole theory falls apart since more and more people are now using mobiles as their primary means of telephony! Sorry guys, this includes mobiles as well.

The advent of low-cost, pervasive, reliable, high-speed, low-latency data carriage on cellular devices has made the use of VoIP on mobile devices not only practical but in many uses preferable to traditional cellular connectivity. The ability to have a single “identity” (there’s that word again) that rings regardless of whether they are near their PC/Laptop or mobile means that they are always contactable on first attempt and that – if the other party is also a Skype (or similar) subscriber – there is no “voice” carriage cost either. Current data plans are such that a user would have to make an enormous amount of calls before they start eating into a typical data quota.

I’ve mentioned the word “identity” a few times and that was deliberate. The concept of ownership of a person’s “corporate” identity is becoming increasingly a matter of concern for businesses. In the past, you got a job and you were given an email address, a desk number and issued with a company mobile phone (with a company SIM inside it). These days, most companies allow (and are more or less required in order to maintain staff morale) staff members to bring their own device (almost always a Smart Phone in the business world). This raises the issue of the SIM card since it creates a very grey legal area of who owns the number and who pays for the calls and data (since the staff member will certainly make personal use of it). To get past this, the most accepted strategy is to provide the staff member with an allowance to go towards their phone and its call/data costs and leave it at that. Problems with this strategy arise when that staff member leaves the company as they are taking with them what is no doubt the primary way that their clients have been making contact with them which in turn helps the company’s clients follow them to their next place of employ.

By using Identity-driven communications, this problem goes away. The user is still issued with an email address, desk phone number and a mobile allowance but now they are forbidden by company policy to hand out their personal mobile number to clients; and it has no appearance on any of their business literature. Their clients are still able to reach them via their desk number as this will simultaneously ring via VoIP; and it will further be policy for them to make all business calls via VoIP from their cellular device. This means that the company in question now completely controls their staff members’ business identities through every means of business communication. This also means that they can audit and – if necessary (and with all due probity) – record their employee’s business calls. Of course this also allows all this wealth of information to be captured into the business’ CRM system (wait, doesn’t Microsoft have one of those too…?).

For these reasons and more, I believe that many businesses will find the move to including their carriage and carriage management through to MS Lync as the center of their communications systems rather than on its periphery to be irresistible.