Go IP for reduced communication costs

Go IP for reduced communication costs

Zatni Arbi, Contributor, zatni@cbn.net.id

This year, the folks at Alcatel Indonesia have a truly strong reason to be upbeat: The company has successfully bolstered its enterprise solution business in Indonesia.

From No. 11 in 2004, it has jumped to the top position in 2005. In addition to being No. 1 in enterprise PABX market, it is now No. 2 in IP telephony segment. This has put Alcatel in the same league as market leaders such as Cisco Systems, Nortel Network and 3Com.

It was not a small feat, especially because this French company is traditionally known as a provider of public telecom infrastructure, such as broadband ADSL, submarine cables and satellites.

The success, however, also reflects the growing emphasis that Indonesian enterprises have placed on the effectiveness and cost efficiency of their communication infrastructure. Two of their chief concerns are, of course, availability and security

Here is some interesting data presented by Alex Filocca, Alcatel's Asia Pacific Marketing Director for Enterprise Solution, at a press briefing here last month. Enterprises, he said, were moving toward to what he would call Real Time Enterprise.

Various forces including customers' growing demand for responsiveness are pushing companies to increase their speed.

Three areas have been affected by the stronger demand for increasing pace. The IT infrastructure must have minimum downtime and maximum security as the impact of unavailability is much more significant today than it was before. According to Infonetics' figures for 2003, if a company experienced one hour downtime, the loss would be 10 times larger than what it would have been just five years earlier.

In the area of security, the threats are not diminishing. In fact, they are always increasing. Today we have Trojan horses and worms, e-mail viruses, database attacks, exploits of application flaws, Denial of Service (DoS) and IP spoofing (the use of a trusted IP address to send malicious packets).

Now, with the proliferation of wireless networks, enterprises become exposed to even more threats.

A survey with 700 respondents conducted by Computer Security Institute (CSI) in cooperation with the FBI revealed that, while the financial loss due to security problems is decreasing in 2005, the average loss still stands at US$200,000 per respondent.

And then there is the issue of productivity. While IT is supposed to boost employee performance, experience has shown that it is not always the case. According to an Alcatel survey in 2004, one-fifth of employees receive more than 100 messages a day.

Almost one-third of them use up to five communication tools -- e-mail, cellphones, faxes, fixed-line phones, etc. Yet, when an immediate response is required and decisions have to be made quickly, these employees are not always reachable.

Addressing the issues

Some time ago, we took a look at Alcatel's Automatic Quarantine Engine (AQE), which would basically isolate a network user the moment a suspicious activity was detected. So, for example, if an employee's notebook has been infected by a virus that tries to spread itself in the network, the Quarantine Engine will response by putting him in until his notebook is cleaned.

To address the need of employees to stay connected while maintaining their mobility, Alcatel has developed its OmniTouch Unified Communication application. With this application suite, which has just received the 2005 Enterprise Communications Applications Product of the Year Award from Frost & Sullivan, an employee can be reached through several different ways.

In non real-time, for example, he can be reached by voice mail, e-mail or fax with the help of the My Messaging application. An integrated text-to-speech capability will allow him to listen to his e-mail messages.

The My Phone application, on the other hand, handles real-time communication while at the same time provides business phone features such as click-to-dial, access to a unified directory and call log on any type of phones -- including mobile phones.

Call screening and routing are handled by an application called My Assistant. The employee can automatically divert calls to voice mail when he goes to bed at night, for example. Of course, he had better assign a privilege to his boss' number- using the Caller ID feature.

And, as real-time enterprises require more collaboration among their employees, the My Teamwork application provides the tools for communications between team members, such as ad hoc or prescheduled conferencing and data as well as application sharing. Alcatel's approach to enterprise communication solution is based on a model that resembles a house.

As the foundation of the communication house, an enterprise should have the IP network, complete with the protection and wireless connectivity to ensure 99.999 percent availability (the network should not be down longer than five minutes a year).

Right on top of the foundation there is the IP Telephony, which provides low communication and operation costs. IP applications, such as Unified Communications and Customer Contact Center, are placed as the roof above the IP telephony layer.

As the highlight of the press briefing, Alcatel ran a live demo of the three hardware and software solutions, including the OmniSwitch LAN switches, Quarantine Manager, Fortinet Security Appliance-which is provided by Alcatel's partner, Alcatel IP PBX, IP phones, Unified Communication application and IP Contact Center for providing customer services.

Clearly, IP technology has increasingly become the backbone of the enterprise communications solutions. If enterprises want to reduce their communication costs, they should start utilizing these IP solutions.