Making the most of IP networked services

Enterprises in all industry sectors, from energy to finance, and healthcare to education, have spent years investing in a complex and costly arrangement of communications assets that are often distributed around the country, or even the world.

In an increasingly competitive global market, these same enterprises are fighting to restructure their network assets to attract an increasingly diverse client base. It's a struggle often carried out against the clock, as markets are squeezed by growing competition.

But IP network services and the increasing maturity of convergence technologies are allowing enterprises to focus on opportunities for service differentiation by introducing networks that provide local, long distance and mobile voice, data and internet services to businesses.

While industry authorities such as the EU are largely responsible for increasing and facilitating competition across markets, these same bodies are also instrumental in increasing the availability of tools to compete more efficiently.

Viviane Reding, the EU's Information Society Commissioner, recently confirmed the importance of ICT take-up across the economy from the largest down to the smallest business.

"Productivity gains at company level through innovations such as e-procurement are transforming business performance," she said.

The European Competitive Telecommunications Association (ECTA) has also asserted that facilitating the adoption of network services will introduce great benefits.

The message is clear: the adoption of broadband by businesses and consumers accelerates when the market opens up and more choice is made available for users.

Steen Clausen, managing director at ECTA, said: "Put simply, opening markets provides a greater opportunity for providers to innovate and drive down prices.

"Competitiveness in broadband also drives adoption among businesses and this is vital for the transformation of the EU economy."

Industry analyst Forrester noted that European enterprises have traditionally built and contracted telecom services in silos.

Ethernet and IP networks have created previously absent opportunities to share infrastructure, but few companies have defined policies to fully benefit from a common network platform across many sites.

A majority of company campus and branch locations have dedicated email servers, telephony systems, conferencing systems, along with local and wide area network services.

Many of the telecom assets, such as fixed and mobile phone services and internet access, are paid for and managed locally.

"Few firms have internal standards for collaboration tools like telephony and email systems resulting in many different suppliers, configurations, budgetary constraints and designs," said Forrester.

"Companies can have different vendors providing the same service but with inconsistent service-level agreements."

But the proliferation of last-mile or tail-broadband circuits is fast becoming the backbone to deliver a new era of network-based services.

IP is prevailing over legacy networks across the local area, fixed access area, wireless access area and the wide area.

IP networks allow firms to consolidate multiple legacy networks, including leased lines, ATM and frame relay, into less or even just one IP network.

The IP network also acts as a service delivery platform, allowing enterprises to extend network management tools to provide end-to-end system management.

A common framework can be used to guide the development of management functions like performance monitoring and control, fault finding, incident tracking, automatic provisioning, configuration and inventory control, change management, security and cost allocation.

On another note, two of the front runners emerging in today's tightly fought technology race are voice over IP (VoIP) and Wi-Fi wireless local area networking.

Savvy enterprises are betting big on these two singularly disruptive technologies which are beginning to have a profound effect on business efficiency due to their potential to boost operational flexibility while simultaneously cutting costs.

And, looking further into the future, the already major impact these innovations are making as standalone technologies is likely to become even more significant as they merge to offer enterprises the dual benefits of Voice over wireless Lans.

With quality of service embedded in the IP network, firms can also consolidate voice and video traffic on the IP network thereby eliminating many dedicated PSTN and ISDN circuits. All of this consolidation results in cost savings for enterprises.

Applications such as telephony, audio and video conferencing, unified communications and contact centre applications all use the IP network to transport audio and video traffic over a common network.

Cost reduction comes through PBX, audio conferencing, and video conferencing system consolidation of a similar magnitude to server consolidation, while additional security is provided by VPN applications.

Industry analyst the Dell'Oro Group has found that many businesses have moved beyond experimenting with IP-based voice technology and are now incorporating it into the fabric of their voice and data network strategies.

"The conversion to VoIP is the dominant factor in the enterprise voice market over the next several years," said Steve Raab, director of IP telephony research at Dell'Oro Group.

Analysts at Gartner, meanwhile, have suggested that network managers must start shifting their focus to technologies that bring new capabilities to the infrastructure and provide services to a distributed workforce, rather than just upgrading to bigger and faster Lans.

"Astute network managers will focus their attention on the upper layers of the stack, and look to security, data control, application optimisation and mobility services as key features that will benefit the organisation far more than installing gigabit Ethernet for all desktops," said Mark Fabbi, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.