Oracle Enterprise Communications Solutions
for Microsoft
®
Lync
®
2
Enterprises across the globe are turning to Microsoft
Lync to improve collaboration and boost worker
productivity.
The popular unified communications (UC) platform’s rich voice, video, instant messaging, and meeting capabilities allow users to stay connected with colleagues and customers – anywhere, anytime.
Oracle’s Lync integration solution helps IT organizations save time and money when integrating Lync with other IP-based communications platforms and services. The solution is ideal for Lync customers who plan to:
• Deploy Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking services • Connect Lync to other UC systems and IP-PBXs
• Institute uniform dial plans and common services across multivendor networks • Extend corporate UC services to Internet users
Extending real-time IP communications sessions across IP networks can be fraught with deployment and operational challenges. Connectivity, security, and control issues can lead to project delays, budget overruns, and poor service quality. Oracle’s Lync
integration solution streamlines Lync rollouts by mitigating complex connectivity, security, and control challenges.
The solution combines a core communications controller with comprehensive session border control and service management functions, helping IT organizations implement highly secure, reliable, and scalable UC services – quickly and cost effectively. It helps Lync customers simplify integration with other IP-based communications platforms and services, protect Internet and SIP trunking borders, and unify dial plans and services across the enterprise. The solution also helps eliminate Lync adoption barriers by allowing end-users to migrate to Lync at their own pace.
Oracle’s Lync integration solution
helps IT organizations save time
and money when integrating Lync
with other IP-based
3
Microsoft Lync Deployment Challenges
IT organizations face complex connectivity, security, and control challenges when interfacing Lync with other IP communications platforms and services.
Connectivity
System incompatibilities, protocol interoperability issues, and product adoption barriers can hinder Lync integration efforts and hamper SIP trunking service deployments. Lync customers often encounter multi-vendor interoperability issues, codec incompatibilities, address scheme disparities, and emergency call handling issues when implementing SIP trunks or connecting to other UC servers or IP-PBXs. And migrating PBX users to Lync for voice – introducing new clients and capabilities – can be disruptive.
Security
SIP trunks and Internet-facing services open the enterprise to a wide range of threats and service quality concerns, including denial of service (DoS) attacks, viruses, and IP telephony spam. Attackers can leverage public domain scanners and reconnaissance tools to identify and exploit security weaknesses from inside or outside the enterprise. Attackers may try to manipulate signaling or media flows, disrupt network infrastructure, eavesdrop on confidential exchanges, or commit service theft.
Control
4
Solution Overview
Oracle’s Lync integration solution is specifically designed to address the complex connectivity, security, and control challenges IT teams typically encounter when integrating Lync into their existing IP telephony environment. The solution simplifies system integration, protects Internet and SIP trunking borders, and enables uniform dial plans and policies across multivendor communications environments. The
comprehensive solution includes the following components:
• Oracle Enterprise Communications Broker is a core communications controller
that orchestrates sessions and connects dissimilar UC systems and IP-PBXs. The product centralizes dial plan management, call control, and session routing functions and mitigates multivendor interoperability issues.
• Oracle Enterprise Session Border Controller secures access to wide area
network (WAN) services, including SIP trunks and the public Internet. The product protects against security threats, mediates protocol differences between network services, adapts to variations in media encoding, and ensures compliance with next-generation emergency calling services.
• Oracle Enterprise Operations Monitor provides extensive end-to-end
management and troubleshooting capabilities. The product simplifies multivendor network operations and helps ensure high service quality for IP communications. • Oracle Communications Consulting Services helps IT organizations simplify
Lync deployment and support. The offering includes extensive project management, pre-installation planning, on-site implementation, and post-installation remote consultative services.
SOLUTION BENEFITS
• Accelerate Lync rollouts by mitigating
product interoperability and service interworking issues
• Improve Lync scalability with load
balancing and Lync media offload capabilities
• Simplify user migration by routing
sessions to preferred softphone or hard phone.
• Deploy with confidence using
Microsoft UCOIP-qualified solutions • Improve service availability by
re-routing sessions around equipment and network failures
• Enforce enterprise policies by routing
sessions based on LDAP/Active Directory database queries • Mitigate risks with advanced
DoS/DDoS and overload protection • Ensure consistent user experiences
with uniform dial plans and policies • Simplify operations with end-to-end
service monitoring and troubleshooting tools
• Eliminate project risk by leveraging
expertise and proven solutions from a market leader
5 Figure 1. Oracle’s Lync integration solution
Key Features
Oracle’s Lync integration solution provides a broad range of features to address the complex connectivity, security, and control challenges associated with integrating Lync with other IP communications platforms and services.
Connect
The solution helps Lync customers accelerate SIP trunking service rollouts and streamline integration with other UC servers and IP-PBXs. Flexible SIP header manipulation rules (HMRs) normalize SIP signaling messages and break down interoperability barriers. Extensive media transcoding and encryption interworking functions simplify SIP trunking service interworking.
Oracle offers optional hardware-based acceleration to enable high-performance transcoding, encryption and QoS scoring. By offloading compute-intensive encryption and transcoding functions, Microsoft customers can avoid Lync Mediation Server sprawl, while improving scalability and performance.
The Oracle solution eliminates adoption barriers by letting end-users migrate to Lync on their own terms. With the unique Active Directory®/LDAP-based call routing feature,
6
Secure
Oracle’s Lync integration solution helps Lync customers protect UC infrastructure, services, and applications. The solution prevents fraud and service theft and guards against malicious attacks, system overloads, and other service-impacting events.
The Oracle solution protects against a wide range of DoS attacks and other service impairments, employing dedicated network and signal processing resources to detect and block DoS attacks without degrading system performance. The solution fully terminates, inspects, and reoriginates signaling and media associated with each session – in real-time – to protect against protocol fuzzing, eavesdropping, hijacking, and other attacks.
Control
Oracle’s Lync integration solution provides a core session routing and control layer that makes the network more scalable and easier to manage. Using this central network element, Lync customers can easily resolve overlapping dial plans, normalize addressing schemes, and implement routing and access control policies. The solution routes around network and equipment failures to ensure continuous service availability; supports SIP trunk and Lync Mediation Server load balancing to optimize performance; and provides flexible policy-based routing to contain costs and optimize service quality.
The Oracle solution helps IT teams efficiently detect, isolate, and resolve service interworking and call quality issues. It gathers key performance indicators, metrics, and alerts on every session flowing through the network, in real-time, helping network administrators identify and resolve problems before they become visible to users. The solution also provides deep drill-down capabilities to isolate problems across
multivendor networks, perform root cause analysis, and resolve issues quickly.
THE HYPER-CONNECTED ENTERPRISE
7
Table 1. Oracle Enterprise Communications Broker
Feature Function/Benefit
Multivendor protocol normalization Mitigate SIP signaling differences between Lync Mediation Server and other IP-PBXs and UC servers
Centralized session routing Control and optimize session routing based on LDAP query, identity, costs, and other parameters
Centralized dial plan management Translate Lync E.164 addresses to address schemes used by legacy IP-PBXs and UC servers
Load balancing and alternative routing Route around hardware or network failures to ensure continuous service availability
Call admission control Protect against system overloads Least cost and QoS-based routing Minimize costs and optimize service quality Active Directory/LDAP-based session
forking
Simultaneously ring multiple endpoints based on user preference
8
Table 2. Oracle Enterprise Session Border Controller
Feature Function/Benefit
Advanced DoS/DDoS and overload protection
Ensure high service integrity and availability
Trunk protocol normalization Mitigate SIP signaling differences between Lync Mediation Server and SIP trunking services
Remove RTP redundancy from Session Description Protocol (SDP) to enable compatibility with SIP trunk service provider Remove Comfort Noise (CN) to enable compatibility with SIP trunk service provider
Transcoding Convert G.711 codec used by Lync Mediation Server to G.729, G.722 or other codec used by a SIP trunk service provider; DTMF interworking (SIP INFO/RFC2833/In-band) including RFC2833 payload type mapping
TLS/SRTP encryption Interwork encrypted Lync Mediation Server sessions (media and signaling) with non-encrypted SIP trunking sessions Lync media bypass Offload encryption and transcoding functions from Lync
Mediation Server to improve scalability and performance, and contain server sprawl
SIPREC support Simplify trunk-side recording for Lync calls Embedded Oracle Enterprise
Operations Monitor probes
Simplify Oracle Enterprise Operations Monitor service monitoring deployment
ELIN gateway support Reconnect an emergency operator with the caller who originally placed an emergency call
Ring-back tone generation Play ring-back tone during transfers so callers don’t hear silence
9
Table 3. Oracle Enterprise Operations Monitor
Feature Function/Benefit
Simple, intuitive GUI, customizable per user
Detect and resolve issues more quickly and easily
In-depth root cause analysis for signaling and media
Efficiently analyze and pinpoint issues
Real-time call correlation and ladder diagrams
Proactively solve issues in real-time; reactively alert with SNMP, email and traces
End-to-End multivendor session visibility
Monitor and troubleshoot the end-to-end, multi-vendor UC environment at the session layer
Open and Accessible Leverage the REST API, built-in applications enablement, and customer KPIs to build relevant reports on the fly
Table 4. Oracle Communications Consulting Services
Feature Function/Benefit
Project management Ensure all installation phases are fully managed and all tasks are completed for each installation phase according to the customer’s schedule
Pre-installation planning Optimize deployment to meet operational requirements On-site implementation service Ensure successful, seamless deployment into production
Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA 94065 U.S.A. Worldwide Inquiries: Phone: +1.650.506.7000 Fax: +1.650.506.7200 oracle.com
Copyright © 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only, and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document, and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission.
Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
