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.