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Challenges for Convergence

The challenges for convergence lie in the ability to implement and administer a sophisticated convergence environment. With multiple vendors come differing standards, inconsistent user management, integration point overload and multiple administation locations. Put it simply as businesses demand more flexibility and functionality on a converged platform the cost and complexity of managing the environment increases.

Innovation in the Enterprise

The most exciting innovation in the Enterprise today is the revolution in corporate communications infrastructure we know as IP Telephony. This is the first step in a major overhaul in the way we communicate, collaborate and coordinate activity around customer and partner relationships. Everything from conferencing, recording, broadcasting, media streaming, directory integration among others. The consensus is that improving workflow around phone communications is on the table.

Enterprise IP Telephony has Arrived

According to Synergy Research Group’s latest report Q3 2005 Enterprise VoIP Market Shares, the Worldwide Enterprise IP Telephony market increased 30.6% year over year. Synergy’s analysis shows Avaya and Cisco being the heavyweights in Q3 - experiencing the most substantial growth worldwide- each growing their Enterprise IP Telephony port shipments nearly 20 percent sequentially.

This growth has its own challenges:

  • Mobility and remote accessibility, real-time interactions, and customer-facing public contacts are the biggest drivers for convergence.

  • Biggest obstacles are cost/ROI issues, legacy organizational, and cultural mindsets.

  • Reliability, QoS, and security of IP Telephony are the most common enterprise concerns impacting the rate of adoption of VOIP and the resulting demand for IPT applications.

  • Individual desktop converged communications management and wireless mobility, exploiting speech interfaces, are usually the first two user needs that are addressed in convergence implementations.

While the need for such technologies is compelling, the common thread to implementating convergence lies in managability, scalabilty, Quality of Service and performance.

We summarized them as :

  • Quality of Service
  • Scalability
  • Managability

Why Convergence Servers?

Convergence Servers allow Enterprises to view converged application integration from a single point. By combing converged applications on a single unified platform, issues of scalability, manageability and Quality of Service can be addressed. Indeed without a platform view of the problem, business cannot adequately address these problems.

The Cistera Convergence Server is the first IP Telephony Convergence platform for voice, video and data integration. 

So why do we need a Convergence Platform?  

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Quality of Service

To implement a single converged application is a relatively straight forward exercise, indeed there are many point applications out there that can be implemented on a Windows PC. However when you need to implement two or more converged application engines suppporting thousands of users, that model quickly breaks down.


Scalability Issues

Scalability has become an important precondition for building out solutions on the IPT Platform. Most IPT Application vendors have no strategy to implement and manage large user populations. For example most applications rely on Windows environment to deliver services which will only scale into the hundreds of phones. To deliver consistently requires an enterprise approach.


Inconsistent User Management

As the proliferation of devices, users, phones and locations increase, the management of user databases becomes more and more important. Single use applications based on the windows platform simply do not manage or scale well. Administrators need a way to manage users, roles and rights from a single central location.