How to Succeed on Your Journey to Unified Communications

The pursuit of unified communications (UC) is inevitable, resulting in a journey that is fraught with risk for those who do not understand unified communications in the context of their business objectives. This paper addresses the complexities of unified communications and highlights opportunities for success and risks for failure, while putting the common goals of many organizations pursuing unified communications in context.

Understanding the roles of various technologies in your unified communications deployment will empower you to ensure the deployment of a unified communications solution that supports the greater goals of the organization and drives the business to achieve long-term strategies, effectively and efficiently. Learn more about how to successfully deploy unified communications in this informative paper, which provides a step- by-step approach to unified communications that meets your business goals and objectives, while optimizing your time and technology investments.

Unified Communications Is Inevitable

Some organizations intentionally pursue unified communications. They build projects to implement it, working with well-known vendors such as Microsoft, Nortel, Cisco, and Avaya. Other organizations adopt technologies from those same vendors without a defined goal of implementing unified communications. The adoption of unified communications is inevitable, whether planned or not.

However, the success of unified communications within the business is anything but inevitable.

To understand your journey to unified communications—planned or unplanned—you must understand what unified communications is. Unfortunately, this is where your challenge begins.

Indeed, one of the biggest debates among unified communications pundits centers on its definition, leaving many people confused.

For you and for most organizations, unified communications is a set of converged communications technologies and business applications designed to make it easier and faster for users and customers to communicate and to make those communications more productive. It should also enable you to improve your business processes that highly depend on communications. Ultimately, unified communications varies from organization to organization. It depends on the business more than the technology. It is almost always multi-vendor, multi-platform, and highly complex. Hence, unified communications is fraught with challenges. Since the business often comes to rely on unified communications, sometimes as a mission-critical service, those challenges lead to enormous business risk.

Your Challenges and Risks

As you move toward unified communications, you will be faced with many interdependent, heterogeneous information and communications technology elements. Unified communications initiatives generally encompass IP telephony, e-mail, instant messaging, audio and video conferencing, presence and contact information, voicemail, and calendaring. Business technologies are often integrated, too; examples include technical support systems, inventory and order management applications, and contact center (sales) systems.

While unified communications culminates from the convergence of many different technologies, many organizations begin their journey with an IP telephony deployment. IP telephony appears at the core of unified communications projects, as shown by Frost & Sullivan’s research:

Attesting to this current trend, Frost & Sullivan predicts that the UC market will grow by 13 percent in 2008 to reach revenues of US$4.55 billion by the end of this year. Much of this immediate growth is expected to come from telephony upgrades, IP telephony migration and email upgrades embedded with UC applications.¹


The word convergence often describes the point at which all of these technologies (data networks, IP telephony, business applications, and more) come together to provide unified communications. For most deployments, the addition of telephony onto the IP network represents the most significant point of convergence.

¹ Frost & Sullivan (July 31, 2008). “Unified Communications - the untapped resources”. Press Release. Retrieved on August 23, 2008.


Unfortunately, IP telephony places new demands on the infrastructure, making it difficult to ensure service delivery and an acceptable, consistent quality of experience. A poor quality of experience puts not only the unified communications implementation at risk, but also the business that relies on it. For example, a poor quality of communications will frustrate customers and employees alike, jeopardizing both customer and employee retention.

There are several factors related to convergence that make unified communications especially challenging:

Today’s IP-based data networks are often not ready for real-time communications: Real- time communications solutions (for example voice and video) rely upon consistent, stable, and low-latency network connections. However, most existing networks are built on protocols and technologies that were not originally designed to be consistent, stable, or low-latency. They introduce delay, data loss, jitter, and other problems to real-time communications protocols. As such, real-time communications delivered over IP networks are prone to service issues that may lead to an unsatisfactory end-user experience.

Native or point tools manage the elements, not the service: Each different technology supporting UC brings its own native management tools. These generally support a specific piece of the infrastructure, not the UC infrastructure as a whole or the experience of the end user. This results in holes in UC management or a patchwork of disparate tools to address the challenge.

Many organizations employ IP telephony from more than one vendor: As described above, unified communications is multi-vendor by its very nature. Furthermore, mergers, acquisitions, and fragmented purchasing processes cause many organizations to employ IP telephony and related technologies from more than one of the major IP telephony vendors (Cisco, Nortel, and Avaya). This exacerbates the management challenge, as few management vendors support multiple IP telephony technologies.

Any successful journey to implementing unified communications must address these and other challenges. In the sections following, we will describe such a journey.

A Successful Unified Communications Journey

Your journey begins prior to deployment and extends through the continued operation and improvement of the new services. However, the journey is almost never done. Most organizations continue to roll out unified communications to new parts of the business, add new technologies to the mix; implement new unified communications-based services, and so on. Therefore, the journey goes on.

Ensuring a successful journey to unified communications depends on taking important steps along the way. In the following section, we will describe several important steps that will maximize your chance of success.

Design Safeguards for Your Unified Communications Services

During your planning and design stage, you must first understand your business goals for unified communications and the associated risks of failure. For example, your business goals may include:

Improved business processes: Unified communications can help you streamline or enhance a business process, such as order handling or customer service. Unified communications can improve the quality of processes as well as further reduce costs.

Reduced human latency: Unified communications can help reduce the time required for people to find and connect with one another and to share information.

Reduced expenses: Supporting the wave of cost-cutting and “going green”, unified communications can help your own organizations shift to a distributed workforce and reduce costly office space. Moreover, online and virtual meetings can help you reduce travel budgets.

Improved customer experience: Unified communications can help you provide better service to your customers. By integrating business applications, unified communications can expedite the resolution of customer issues while delivering a higher quality of communication experience. In turn, your business goals determine what’s at risk if there are problems with unified communications. For example, the risks associated with an expense reduction goal are different from the risks associated with improving customer experience.

Once you understand your business goals and the associated risks, it is time to design appropriate safeguards for your unified communications services. We recommend a business impact assessment that follows these general steps:

Specify the business services that depend on unified communications. Define and articulate the business processes, applications, users, and other components within the scope of the unified communications implementation.

Identify what could go wrong with your unified communications service, as currently designed. Like any IP-based application, network issues cause problems with the performance of unified communications. So do problems with servers, such as hardware failures, capacity constraints, power failures, and so on. In fact, the voice component of unified communications should be considered less reliable than older but more stable technologies.

Determine the impact of service problems. Considering what can go wrong, what is the impact? For example, what is the business impact of your losing your voice service or having degraded voice quality? What happens if a call center server fails? What if you lose your Internet connection, cutting off e-mail?

Define measures to prevent, detect, and recover from those problems. How will you know there is a problem with your unified communications service? In some cases, it is obvious: there is a complete failure of communications. In most cases, however, the problems are less obvious and can include conditions that steadily degrade over time, impacting the business along the way.

Many organizations fail to consider the potential problems and define safeguards as part of the design. They often pay the price later, having to retrofit more costly safeguards because they were not part of the original design. Avoid that mistake.

Test for a Successful Roll-Out of IP Telephony

As described above, IP telephony is often the starting point for unified communications. Furthermore, it represents the biggest change to the demands on the network. Adding IP telephony to a network not only puts the quality of voice at risk but also jeopardizes the performance of other applications on the network. Therefore, unified communications must be built on a solid foundation for IP telephony.

This means the network must be capable of supporting Voice over IP (VoIP) and good voice quality.

While a stable foundation for IP telephony is necessary, you do not want to over-invest in you IP network infrastructure. You should optimize your infrastructure and leverage your existing investments. You should also identify and address potential problems early—before the deployment to ensure success.

To ensure a strong foundation for IP telephony while optimizing your investment, you should perform a network readiness assessment to uncover existing system capabilities and constraints. The network readiness assessment helps you evaluate the capacity and configuration of your network to support the anticipated communications traffic.

There are two primary approaches for you to assess network readiness:

Hire a qualified consultant. There are both independent consultants, and consultants employed by your network technology vendors. Just be careful to avoid a consultant’s bias for over- investing in your infrastructure. Both independent and vendor-employed consultants can exhibit this bias, as network upgrades can make both of them money.

Acquire a tool to perform the assessment. Employing a tool avoids consultant bias and generally costs less than hiring consultants. You can also use the tool before subsequent roll-outs or after changes are made to your IP network (upgrades, additions, and so on). However, having your own tool may require you to have more expertise, as you will have to set up the assessment and interpret the results.

Regardless of which approach you take to a readiness assessment, look for a solution that delivers a “go/no-go” decision on whether or not to proceed with the IP telephony deployment. The results should tell you if your network is capable of supporting the VoIP traffic along with your existing data traffic. It should reflect your desired voice quality, too. Ultimately, the “go/no-go” decision should be based on an unequivocal assessment.

Manage the Complete Service

Once the unified communications technologies are deployed, you must constantly monitor and manage them to ensure service levels are maintained, including the availability of services and the quality of the end-user experience. Users have come to expect constant availability and a high quality of communications, especially over landline phones. As a result, you must quickly resolve quality issues to keep your users (possibly including customers) satisfied.

One of your biggest challenges in managing unified communications is its very complexity and multi- vendor nature. You will depend on a solution that must be able to manage a lot of different parts from a lot of different vendors. Unified communications platform vendors will struggle to solve your management needs because their management tools generally support only their own platforms.

Furthermore, merely managing the different parts is not enough.

In order to manage your complete service, you will need a 360° monitoring capability. 360° monitoring provides both an internal and external view of the health of your unified communications service. 360° monitoring helps you manage the health of the unified communications elements (for example, IP telephony, voicemail, e-mail, conferencing, business applications, and so on.) and the quality of your end users’ experience by monitoring them in real-time. 360° monitoring measures the quality of experience by evaluating voice quality and the response times of important applications that are part of UC. In other words, it measures end-user experience.

Continuously Improve the Quality of Service

Unified communications exists in complex and dynamic environments. You will introduce new applications onto the same IP network that supports your unified communications technologies.

Furthermore, unified communications will be rolled out to more and more users over time. Therefore, you must make frequent adjustments to the unified communications applications and technologies, including the network, based on your users’ experiences and other metrics.

Improving the quality of service is difficult without the right tools. In particular, you need the ability to diagnose problems with quality and to fix issues. Quality diagnostics tools can give you the ability to quickly and easily troubleshoot issues that are impacting service quality. These tools can also provide you with the knowledge that you need to troubleshoot problems with your unified communications technologies, especially IP telephony. Therefore, you may not need to hire expertise that you do not already have.

The quality of unified communications should also be governed by Service Level Agreements (SLAs). If it is, you should implement service level reporting to satisfy key stakeholders, such as internal technology owners, business owners, and customers. This reporting will also help you identify service issues and make adjustments to keep you within service level commitments.

NetIQ’s Unified Communications Management Solution

NetIQ’s unified communications management solution leverages years of industry leading experience providing extensive visibility to an organization’s converged voice and data environment. Offering management capabilities for fundamental unified communications technologies, NetIQ provides you with the most trusted and comprehensive solution for managing unified communications.

NetIQ’s unified communications management solution provides you the following capabilities:

Manage the entire unified communications lifecycle: As depicted by the graphic below, the NetIQ solution begins where your unified communications lifecycle begins, with pre-deployment planning and assessment capabilities, and extends through management, operation, and future roll-outs.

Provides extensive visibility into your unified communications system: Only NetIQ’s solution can give you a view of all the major elements (network, servers, infrastructure, and applications) and from all different levels (from low-level diagnostics to end-user experience to high-level service maps). With such comprehensive visibility, you can more clearly identify service issues and their causes.

Ensures a good experience of your IP telephony end users. The NetIQ solution proactively monitors VoIP call quality and reports on quality of experience metrics, including jitter, jitter buffer loss, delay, lost data, and Mean Opinion Score (MOS). With this information, you can identify problems quickly, helping to reduce their impact on your business.

Simplifies your management of unified communications: The NetIQ solution simplifies unified communications management for you by providing knowledge, reports, diagnostics, and other features to automate management even when the organization’s expertise may be limited.

Frees you from vendor lock: Most companies deploy at least two of the four major vendors (Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft and Nortel) as part of their implementation. Only NetIQ supports all four, meaning you are free to manage whatever technologies you own now or inherit later. Moreover, our solution can scale as your organization grows or requires additional management capabilities.

This includes the adoption of virtualization technologies, execution of unified communications initiatives, or increased process automation.

Unified communications is often expansive when truly integrated and deployed. The heterogeneous nature of our solution allows you to manage the breadth and depth of your platforms and applications through a single dynamic view. Moreover, we provide native support for more than 70 business and infrastructure technologies. Monitoring, troubleshooting, reporting, diagnosing, and resolving events with one management solution enables you to correlate events and take corrective or preventative action, while decreasing the skill level, resources, and time to resolve issues.

Conclusion

As you seek to improve employee productivity, decrease expenses, streamline business process, and improve customer experience, you will inevitably find yourself on the path of unified communications.

This will result in an increased reliance on the converged voice and data network. To ensure your journey to UC is smooth and productive and to guarantee the optimal performance and availability of a UC environment, you should take a multi-part, lifecycle approach composed of planning, managing, and improving the communication experience. The UC management process is not linear in nature.

As business needs and organizational structure change and evolve, the lifecycle should be repeated to meet the ever-changing goals of your organization. To learn more about how NetIQ enables organizations to enjoy a successful journey to UC, visit the NetIQ Unified Communications Management Solution web page: http://www.netiq.com/solutions/ucm/default.asp

About NetIQ

NetIQ, an Attachmate business, is a global leader in systems and security management. With more than 12,000 customers in over 60 countries, NetIQ solutions maximize technology investments and enable IT process improvements to achieve measurable cost savings. For more information on NetIQ’s portfolio of award-winning products for IT Process Automation, Systems Management, Security Management, Configuration Audit and Control, Enterprise Administration, and Unified Communications, please visit www.netiq.com or contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

About Attachmate

Attachmate enables IT organizations to extend mission critical services and assure they are managed, secure, and compliant. Our goal is to empower IT organizations to deliver trusted applications, manage services levels, and ensure compliance by leveraging knowledge, automation, and secured connectivity. To fulfill that goal, we offer solutions that include host connectivity, systems and security management, and PC lifecycle management.