Go IP for reduced communication costs<\/p>\n
Zatni Arbi, Contributor, zatni@cbn.net.id<\/p>\n
This year, the folks at Alcatel Indonesia have a truly strong
\nreason to be upbeat: The company has successfully bolstered its
\nenterprise solution business in Indonesia.<\/p>\n
From No. 11 in 2004, it has jumped to the top position in
\n2005. In addition to being No. 1 in enterprise PABX market, it is
\nnow No. 2 in IP telephony segment. This has put Alcatel in the
\nsame league as market leaders such as Cisco Systems, Nortel
\nNetwork and 3Com.<\/p>\n
It was not a small feat, especially because this French
\ncompany is traditionally known as a provider of public telecom
\ninfrastructure, such as broadband ADSL, submarine cables and
\nsatellites.<\/p>\n
The success, however, also reflects the growing emphasis that
\nIndonesian enterprises have placed on the effectiveness and cost
\nefficiency of their communication infrastructure. Two of their
\nchief concerns are, of course, availability and security<\/p>\n
Here is some interesting data presented by Alex Filocca,
\nAlcatel's Asia Pacific Marketing Director for Enterprise
\nSolution, at a press briefing here last month. Enterprises, he
\nsaid, were moving toward to what he would call Real Time
\nEnterprise.<\/p>\n
Various forces including customers' growing demand for
\nresponsiveness are pushing companies to increase their speed.<\/p>\n
Three areas have been affected by the stronger demand for
\nincreasing pace. The IT infrastructure must have minimum downtime
\nand maximum security as the impact of unavailability is much more
\nsignificant today than it was before. According to Infonetics'
\nfigures for 2003, if a company experienced one hour downtime, the
\nloss would be 10 times larger than what it would have been just
\nfive years earlier.<\/p>\n
In the area of security, the threats are not diminishing. In
\nfact, they are always increasing. Today we have Trojan horses and
\nworms, e-mail viruses, database attacks, exploits of application
\nflaws, Denial of Service (DoS) and IP spoofing (the use of a
\ntrusted IP address to send malicious packets).<\/p>\n
Now, with the proliferation of wireless networks, enterprises
\nbecome exposed to even more threats.<\/p>\n
A survey with 700 respondents conducted by Computer Security
\nInstitute (CSI) in cooperation with the FBI revealed that, while
\nthe financial loss due to security problems is decreasing in
\n2005, the average loss still stands at US$200,000 per respondent.<\/p>\n
And then there is the issue of productivity. While IT is
\nsupposed to boost employee performance, experience has shown that
\nit is not always the case. According to an Alcatel survey in
\n2004, one-fifth of employees receive more than 100 messages a
\nday.<\/p>\n
Almost one-third of them use up to five communication tools --
\ne-mail, cellphones, faxes, fixed-line phones, etc. Yet, when an
\nimmediate response is required and decisions have to be made
\nquickly, these employees are not always reachable.<\/p>\n
Addressing the issues<\/p>\n
Some time ago, we took a look at Alcatel's Automatic
\nQuarantine Engine (AQE), which would basically isolate a network
\nuser the moment a suspicious activity was detected. So, for
\nexample, if an employee's notebook has been infected by a virus
\nthat tries to spread itself in the network, the Quarantine Engine
\nwill response by putting him in until his notebook is cleaned.<\/p>\n
To address the need of employees to stay connected while
\nmaintaining their mobility, Alcatel has developed its OmniTouch
\nUnified Communication application. With this application suite,
\nwhich has just received the 2005 Enterprise Communications
\nApplications Product of the Year Award from Frost & Sullivan, an
\nemployee can be reached through several different ways.<\/p>\n
In non real-time, for example, he can be reached by voice
\nmail, e-mail or fax with the help of the My Messaging
\napplication. An integrated text-to-speech capability will allow
\nhim to listen to his e-mail messages.<\/p>\n
The My Phone application, on the other hand, handles real-time
\ncommunication while at the same time provides business phone
\nfeatures such as click-to-dial, access to a unified directory and
\ncall log on any type of phones -- including mobile phones.<\/p>\n
Call screening and routing are handled by an application
\ncalled My Assistant. The employee can automatically divert calls
\nto voice mail when he goes to bed at night, for example. Of
\ncourse, he had better assign a privilege to his boss' number-
\nusing the Caller ID feature.<\/p>\n
And, as real-time enterprises require more collaboration among
\ntheir employees, the My Teamwork application provides the tools
\nfor communications between team members, such as ad hoc or
\nprescheduled conferencing and data as well as application
\nsharing. Alcatel's approach to enterprise communication solution
\nis based on a model that resembles a house.<\/p>\n
As the foundation of the communication house, an enterprise
\nshould have the IP network, complete with the protection and
\nwireless connectivity to ensure 99.999 percent availability (the
\nnetwork should not be down longer than five minutes a year).<\/p>\n
Right on top of the foundation there is the IP Telephony,
\nwhich provides low communication and operation costs. IP
\napplications, such as Unified Communications and Customer Contact
\nCenter, are placed as the roof above the IP telephony layer.<\/p>\n
As the highlight of the press briefing, Alcatel ran a live
\ndemo of the three hardware and software solutions, including the
\nOmniSwitch LAN switches, Quarantine Manager, Fortinet Security
\nAppliance-which is provided by Alcatel's partner, Alcatel IP PBX,
\nIP phones, Unified Communication application and IP Contact
\nCenter for providing customer services.<\/p>\n
Clearly, IP technology has increasingly become the backbone of
\nthe enterprise communications solutions. If enterprises want to
\nreduce their communication costs, they should start utilizing
\nthese IP solutions.<\/p>",
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