INTRODUCTION
1.
PLAN AHEAD
2. OPTIMIZE VIDEO
3. DEPLOY MULTIMEDIA SBCs
P L A Y B O O K
sonus.net
3 STRATEGIES
for Successfully
UNLOCK THE FULL POTENTIAL OF
VIDEO-ENABLED UC
BUSINESS COMMUNICATIONS have never been more varied, or more critical, than in today’s fast-paced and digitally powered world. Many companies seek to bring order and cost-effectiveness to the chaotic communications scene through Unified Communications (UC). While UC can have many definitions, the simplest way to think of it is as a broad set of collaboration technologies—such as instant messaging, presence, voice and videoconferencing—accessible through a common interface on myriad devices ranging from office phones to PCs to smartphones and tablets.
Ideally, a UC solution can support any device and media type and can present a consistent and cohesive experience across all of them. The dramatic increase in video communications in recent years—driven in large part by the explosion of video-enabled smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices—is putting pressure on UC solutions, but also giving them new opportunities to drive significant business benefits. Forrester Research predicts that by 2017, tablets will be used by more than 1 in 8 people on earth, including 29 percent of online consumers globally. According to Forrester, 60 percent of online consumers in North America and 42 percent in Europe will own a tablet by 2017. Of the 381 million units sold by 2017, enterprise purchases will make up 18 percent—having risen every year as a percentage of sales since the inception of the market.
While Unified Communications has become a near-universal goal, it has often proven difficult to fully realize. UC solutions from one vendor are frequently incompatible with solutions from other vendors, and the integration of cross-platform videoconferencing into UC solutions has proven particularly challenging, especially as the number of video-capable devices has skyrocketed. These types of disconnects can stall—or even halt—UC deployments.
How can organizations take full advantage of the video-enhanced age of UC now dawning? This playbook outlines the three critical steps companies can take to achieve the best business outcome with UC projects. By following these steps, organizations will be able to inte-grate video seamlessly and securely into UC solutions. By doing so, they can increase cost savings and productivity to an all-new level.
INTRODUCTION
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PLAN AHEAD
2. OPTIMIZE VIDEO
3. DEPLOY MULTIMEDIA SBCs
THE RISING POPULARITY OF UNIFIED
COMMUNICATIONS
LARGE PERCENTAGES OF COMPANIES, drawn by the many promises of Unified Communications, have deployed UC solutions of one sort or another in recent years. An IDG Enterprise survey of more than 1,100 decision makers involved in the purchase of communica-tions systems found that nearly 60 percent were currently using or piloting UC solutions.
As illustrated in Figure 1, the survey respondents cited a variety of drivers for their UC investments, but the goal of increasing produc-tivity dominated the list.
INTRODUCTION
1. PLAN AHEAD
2. OPTIMIZE VIDEO
3. DEPLOY MULTIMEDIA SBCs
P L A Y B O O K
FIGURE 1.
PRIMARY DRIVERS FOR UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS
FIGURE 2.
CHALLENGES OF
IMPLEMENTING
UC SOLUTIONS
Despite the many attractions of UC, companies also face a number of challenges when implementing solutions of this type. As is often the case with IT investments, funding the solution was the No. 1 concern. Other top challenges included integrating and securing the UC solu-tion, and supporting mobile workers with it.
Increased productivity Incrased flexibility for employees Faster response time/delivery of information Improved external customer service Reduced travel costs Faster decision-making Better-informed decision-making
Cost/
funding Integration wtih
existing infrastructure Lack of experience/ skills sets Security/
privacy bandwidth Network
limitations
61%
54%
42%
47%
33%
31%
27%
39%
30%
28%
19%
17%
INTRODUCTION
1. PLAN AHEAD
2. OPTIMIZE VIDEO
3. DEPLOY MULTIMEDIA SBCs
P L A Y B O O K
ADDING VIDEOCONFERENCING TO THE UC MIX
EARLY UC SOLUTIONS from companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya and others focused on replacing proprietary time division multiplexing (TDM)-based PBXs with Internet Protocol (IP)-based communications. More recently, solutions such as Microsoft Lync have taken advantage of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), a standard used to control voice and video calls over IP networks. Also, IP phone service providers and others now offer “SIP trunking” to deliver UC services to enterprise customers. A SIP trunk is a virtual connection between an IP-PBX and a telephone service provider offering SIP-based voice and UC services, connected over an enterprise’s data network connections. Both within the UC trend and parallel to it, videoconferencing has become a pervasive business practice. According to the Nemertes Research Pervasive Video Collaboration Benchmark Report, desktop videoconferencing deployments are increasing rapidly. Twenty-three percent of companies have deployed desktop video to more than half of their employees, up from 9 percent of companies that had deployed that extensively in 2012. In addition, more than half of respondents are using or are planning to deploy capabilities for business-to-business videoconferencing.
The business case for videoconferencing, whether point-to-point or point-to-multipoint, can be compelling. Many firms have slashed travel budgets by substituting video meetings for trips. Video allows a knowledge-based worker to attend multiple, interactive meetings daily without regard to the physical distance that separates the meetings and the participants. Videoconferencing can support more effective collabo-ration among distributed teams and can give companies the ability to interact with customers face to face, even if they are a world apart. Compared with voice or email exchanges, “when people can see each other, it makes their interactions much richer,” says Brent Kelly, president and principal analyst at KelCor, an analysis and consulting firm. “You can see faces and body language. If you’re meeting each other for the first time or if you’re doing something like performance appraisals, it’s much more difficult to do so without video.”
A Global View: Business Video Conferencing Usage and Trends survey of more than 1,200 business decision makers, conducted by Redshift Research, reinforces video’s distinct benefits and potential. Survey respondents ranked video as the third-most preferred method of business communication at present, behind email and voice/ conference calls. In three years, however, the respondents expected videoconferencing to become the most preferred method of business communication.
Catalyzing this rising importance is the proliferation of hundreds of millions of video-enabled smartphones and other mobile devices. Some companies will continue to use large and sophisticated video-conferencing rooms for high-quality and multiparticipant meetings. But an increasing percentage of business video sessions will occur over mobile devices and PCs that use point-to-point videoconfer-encing software such as Microsoft’s Skype or Apple’s FaceTime.
MOST PREFERRED
METHOD OF BUSINESS
COMMUNICATION
NOW
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EMAIL VOICE CONFERENCE CALL VIDEO-CONFERENCING
VIDEO-
CONFERENCING
IN 3 YEARS
INTRODUCTION
1. PLAN AHEAD
2. OPTIMIZE VIDEO
3. DEPLOY MULTIMEDIA SBCs
P L A Y B O O K
SORTING OUT VIDEO-CONFERENCING STANDARDS
THE SHIFT IN VIDEOCONFERENCING hardware has also been accompanied by a shift in the communications protocols. There are two major multimedia protocols at play in the market, H.323 and SIP. Without some form of intervention, systems based on these two proto-cols can’t interoperate. Furthermore, UC solutions vendors extend and implement H.323 and SIP in different ways, meaning that even systems purportedly using the same multimedia protocols may not be able to easily communicate with one another.
Meanwhile, new communications protocols continue to emerge. One of the most promising is WebRTC, which enables real-time voice, video and data sharing in a Web browser without the need for any browser plug-ins. “Thanks to WebRTC, anyone with a Web browser made by Google or Mozilla already has video embedded in their browser,” says KelCor’s Kelly.
As they move to add video to the voice and data repertoires of their UC solutions, enterprises need help navigating among the many technical variables at play. And they need to create multimedia UC solutions that address a slate of critical enterprise requirements.
Understanding SBC Sessions
It is important to understand a key principle behind how SBCs work. Essentially, SBCs are built around a concept called the back-to-back user agent. In layman’s terms, this means that all calls are terminated at the session border controller.
For example, if a video endpoint located outside of the firewall wants to communicate with a video endpoint inside of the firewall, there are actually two legs to the call: one leg between the external video endpoint and the SBC, and a second leg between the SBC and the internal endpoint. The same would be true for video between endpoints located within the firewall. It is this ability to provide governance and control on each indi-vidual session that makes an SBC such a powerful and useful infrastructure element in the “just works” video-enabled network.
INTRODUCTION
1.
PLAN AHEAD
2. OPTIMIZE VIDEO
3. DEPLOY MULTIMEDIA SBCs
P L A Y B O O K
Got Video? You Need an SBC.
People want video systems that work, and they want them to work regardless of which video-enabled device they happen to be using at any particular time. Video helps people be more creative, interactive, engaged and productive. Designing a video solution that “just works” does not need to be hard, but it does require forethought and planning to provide the most flexibility and utility for the people who use it.
While users may “just want video to work,” the complexities behind making it work can be challenging. The good news for business managers is that video and video infrastructure have evolved to the point such that with some foresight and planning, “making video work” is readily achievable. Here are five considerations to help make your video deployment successful:
1.
Carefully evaluate where call admission control, call routing and quality-of-service (QoS) packet markings should be done. These can be done by PBXs, video management systems or SBCs. You will likely find that putting these into the SBC will provide more flexibility and lower maintenance costs, and deliver better system performance and interop-erability. The communications market is seeing a general trend toward moving these functions into the SBC and out of the PBX, particularly in companies with multiple brands of PBXs and with varying UC desktop clients, video endpoints and infrastructure.2.
Plan to deploy an SBC if you will allow video calls to traverse the firewall/NAT before entering or exiting the network. Even for video systems that provide “secure” videoconferencing without a VPN (i.e., Microsoft Lync and Cisco Jabber), an SBC is an important element for a secure and scalable solution.3.
Not all SBCs are created equal in terms of functionality and processing power. You will be well served by generating real use cases on how people in the organization want to use video, and then follow both the signaling and the media flow through the network and through all intermediary devices to make sure that you have the right infrastructure, including SBCs, MCUs, etc. Video bandwidth can grow quickly as the take-up rate increases. It is imperative that SBC capacity can accommodate the ramp in network bandwidth without compromising features and performance.4.
Security is normally thought of as securing the borders of an enterprise from intruders. UC sessions extend past the boundaries of the enter-prise to support a mobile workforce, communications with suppliers or interfacing in a more intimate manner with customers. These sessions will require encryption to ensureconfidentiality even across shared mediums such as the Internet or Wi-Fi access points.
5.
There are a number of SBCs on the market, and choosing among them is not always easy. Before buying any SBC, put it into your network and run through your own use cases to make sure it will do the session management your organiza-tion needs. Furthermore, verify that the SBC will provide all of the signaling normalization, interoper-ability and security functions your organization and its people require.Creating the “It Just Works” Video Network
Enterprise Video That Meets People’s Expectations
November 2013
Sponsored by:
E. Brent Kelly, Ph.D. Principal Analyst
A KelCor Thought Leadership Paper
INTRODUCTION
1.
PLAN AHEAD
2. OPTIMIZE VIDEO
3. DEPLOY MULTIMEDIA SBCs
P L A Y B O O K
ENTERPRISE VIDEOCONFERENCING REQUIREMENTS
WHILE VOICE AND DATA COMMUNICATIONS are well estab-lished and understood, videoconferencing is still new territory for many IT and business executives. When dealing with video sessions, people tend to focus on one thing: the quality of the video images. This characteristic, along with other quality-of-service capabilities, however, represents just one of three core enterprise videoconferencing needs. Providing interoperability among different video systems and devices, and ensuring the security of the videoconferencing traffic, are also critical requirements.
People using video want and expect solutions that “just work.” And, “just working” may mean different things to different people, depending upon their immediate circumstances. For example:
A traveling executive may want video from her tablet coming in over a virtual private network (VPN) connection to display well on the telepresence screen the board of directors is viewing.
A customer needs help and wants to use video on his smartphone to interface with someone so that he can properly fill out an application or locate the right service part.
Engineering teams working at remote locations need to meet regularly for progress reviews, but there is limited wide-area network bandwidth between the sites.
The Video Challenge for IT
These and many other strong business use cases illuminate how people are using video; they also highlight some of the challenges video systems that “just work” must overcome. For example:
1. In the case of the traveling executive, video from her tablet must be made interoperable with any video system; furthermore, her video image must be rendered with sufficient resolution so that it can be viewed on the telepresence screens without distortion.
2. The smartphone user traverses the public Internet, is authenti-cated, and the video must be securely routed to the right party within the organization in order to receive the help requested.
3. The engineering teams cannot saturate the network with just video or other key business processes that rely on the network may cease to function; hence, call admission and bandwidth control are required to ensure a high-quality experience within the confines of limited network bandwidth capacity.
The smartphone
user traverses the
public Internet, is
authenticated, and
the video must be
securely routed to
the right party within
the organization
INTRODUCTION
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PLAN AHEAD
2. OPTIMIZE VIDEO
3. DEPLOY MULTIMEDIA SBCs
P L A Y B O O K
Quality of Service
More than digitized audio traffic, video transmissions are especially vulnerable to dropped packets. What might be a trivial glitch in an audio conversation can be a very visible and distracting breakdown of a video feed. Also, the available network bandwidths for a video session might range from 100 kilobits/second to more than 12 megabits/second. The videoconferencing infrastructure must be able to deliver the best-quality images and audio possible over whatever bandwidth is in play.
Beyond the quality of the video feed itself, good UC solutions will also permit companies to implement rules and policies that enforce their specific business requirements. For example, companies should be able to prioritize the importance of different video sessions based on the roles of the meeting participants or the relative importance of the meeting to the company’s business. With that capability, a UC system can divert bandwidth and other system resources to high-value video-conferences, drawing those resources from less important meetings.
Endpoint Interoperability
As mentioned, UC systems from one vendor typically won’t inter-operate with UC systems from other vendors without some form of intervention. Videoconferencing interoperability can be particularly difficult, but it wasn’t a high-priority issue when videoconferencing was a relatively rare phenomenon. Companies set up dedicated videoconferencing systems that would support their employees, who were using known devices and software.
With videoconferencing becoming a more pervasive business practice, and with the number and variety of video-enabled devices exploding, being confined to the environment of a single UC system can be a significant drag on a company’s operations and options. Increasingly, companies need to set up multimedia sessions with partners and customers, and those people will often engage via different corporate UC systems or directly via personal video-enabled devices. With the rise of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, even a company’s own employees may introduce new video-enabled devices that may not be compatible with an existing corporate UC system.
Security
Companies have always been concerned about securing their data and voice communications. In some instances, however, this security consciousness hasn’t extended to the burgeoning world of video traffic. With the rapid adoption of BYOD programs, network security remains a primary concern for information technology (IT) decision makers. BYOD video presents even greater challenges to network compliance as video delivered outside of the firewall without encryp-tion is a prime target for theft. If a company is holding a videoconfer-ence that, for example, includes employees connecting over a Star-bucks or another public Wi-Fi network, however, the company needs to ensure that even those participants outside of its corporate firewall are communicating securely.
“The presence of E-SBCs will grow within businesses
to integrate and protect the next generation of UC
services and platforms.”
—Michael Brandenburg Information and Communication Technologies Industry Analyst Frost & Sullivan
INTRODUCTION
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PLAN AHEAD
2. OPTIMIZE VIDEO
3. DEPLOY MULTIMEDIA SBCs
P L A Y B O O K
Secrets of Smarter Communication with the Fourth Dimension of Collaboration
Scott Brown estimates that he has spent eight full years in conference rooms during his working career, with significantly less than eight years of productivity to show for it—in part because of the 8 to 10 minutes it normally takes for each conference to start. Brown, President of Enterprise at SMART Technologies—and self-professed “enterprise communications warrior”—is on a mission to return those lost minutes (and years) to employees everywhere. All that’s needed is access to a video-capable device and the Internet. Oh, and one more thing: access to the fourth dimension.
As Brown sees it, there are four dimensions of collaboration:
The first dimension involves one-to-one conversations using a single type of media, such as a phone call.
The second dimension adds a second layer of media, such as a video call that features both audio and video.
In the third dimension, voice and video are joined by the ability to share and view documents, screens or applications.
In the fourth dimension, however, participants now have the ability to contribute to ideas, interact with data in real-time and collaborate as though they were in the same location—essentially replicating the conference room experience.
If all of that sounds slightly scientific, it’s no wonder; SMART Technologies are the “brains” behind many of the K–12 collaborative classroom systems developed over the last 25 years, with multiple patents in interactive display technologies. In the last several years, SMART Technologies has translated that vision into the enterprise space through its SMART Room System™—developed
in partnership with Microsoft and leveraging the Microsoft® Lync® platform.
When asked what separates the SMART Room System virtual conference room experience from first-generation telepresence technology, Brown gets straight to the point. “It just works,” he says. “You walk into the room, touch a button and the conference starts.
As a modern-day liberator of lost time, Brown shares five secrets from the fourth dimension that lead to better virtual conferences:
1) Choose a system that’s user friendly. People will adopt a new system sooner if it’s easy to use the first time they use it.
2) Don’t get hung up on phone numbers. It’s fast becoming a click-to-call world, so make sure your system supports click-to-call connectivity from a variety of applications and devices.
3) Get federated. Federation through Unified Communications is creating a new and more effective paradigm of collaboration where the distinction between employees and partners has disappeared.
4) Follow up sooner with action items. Virtual conferences can easily be recorded and disseminated right after the conference ends, so everyone has a record of the meeting
and their action items.
5) Deploy a session border controller. This powerful device typically sits at the edge of the network, providing a clear demarca-tion point between video endpoints inside the trusted network and those outside
the trusted network.
VIDEO:
Scott Brown of SMART Technologies talks about video collaboration.INTRODUCTION
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SESSION BORDER CONTROLLERS ARE THE
LINCHPINS FOR REAL-TIME UC
GIVEN THE RANGE OF UC SYSTEMS, traffic types, protocols and devices, sorting out all of the complexities to deliver secure and interoperable enterprise UC solutions might seem an insurmountable task. Fortunately, a multifaceted networking component, the session border controller (SBC), can take on all of these challenges. SBCs work as the Swiss Army knives of IP networks, controlling and securing the signaling and media streams traversing them, interworking different protocols to allow intersystem compatibility and implementing policy controls that individual enterprises can define.
Most often, SBCs reside in the infrastructure of network service providers, where enterprises can access their functionality via SIP trunking connections. Not every SBC solution is part of such cloud-based “communications-as-a-service” offerings, however. Enterprises can also choose to deploy SBCs on their own corporate networks, where the devices serve as a secure point of demarcation to the carriers. Until recently, SBCs, like the UC systems they supported, have focused on tracking and interworking audio sessions over IP networks. The release of a new generation of multimedia SBCs, however, is adding a videoconferencing piece to complete the multimedia UC puzzle.
Video Demands Highlight the Value
of Multimedia SBCs
The SBC’s ability to add videoconferencing support to Unified Communications comes at a time when enterprise demand for videoconferencing is rapidly escalating.
Multimedia SBCs should address three core areas of enterprise multimedia UC needs:
QUALITY OF EXPERIENCE
The most important UC factor from a user’s perspective is the quality of the communications experience. High quality and ease of use are especially important when it comes to video communications. Among other characteristics, a multimedia SBC should:
Enable bandwidth call admission control and overload protection policies for video traffic
INTRODUCTION
1.
PLAN AHEAD
2. OPTIMIZE VIDEO
3. DEPLOY MULTIMEDIA SBCs
P L A Y B O O K
Sonus is a global leader in IP networking with proven expertise in delivering secure, reliable and scalable next-generation infrastructure and subscriber solutions. Sonus has the broadest portfolio of Microsoft Lync qualified Session Border Controllers (SBCs), providing the industry's only end-to-end portfolio to deliver SIP-enabled applications from the branch office to the central office. For more information, call +1-855-GO-SONUS or visit
www.sonus.net
Permit enterprises to prioritize videoconferencing traffic to ensure high-quality multimedia sessions
Provide video codec reordering to reduce session setup time and to optimize bandwidth use
INTEROPERABILITY
A variable that affects both users and IT administrators is the ability of the UC solution to interoperate with a wide range of devices sold by different vendors and that use different implementations of the same standard or different standards altogether. A multimedia SBC should:
Normalize multivendor SIP signaling environments
Integrate the video silos—room-based systems, single flat-panel systems, desktops, mobile devices—that may be running within a single corporation
Interwork the various signaling methods to allow for end-to-end delivery of multimedia traffic regardless of the devices used
SECURITY
The security of a multimedia UC solution may not be as apparent as its quality of service or its interoperability, but ensuring secure communications will often be the No. 1 IT and business concern. Most managers are accustomed to thinking about data security and voice communications security, but they may overlook the need to secure their videoconferencing sessions. Here again, a multimedia SBC-based solution can:
Hide network topology to safeguard internal private networks Protect against denial-of-service (DoS) and distributed DOS
attacks of the UC application(s)
Permit blacklisting of unauthorized endpoints so they can’t use conferencing facilities or services
Encrypt video transmissions to prevent intrusions into videoconferencing sessions, thereby protecting privacy and maintaining compliance standards
Securely extend videoconferencing services to users behind a firewall
SBCs are the Vehicles to Reach True UC
Thanks to a new generation of sophisticated SBCs, organizations today can more easily, and more effectively, capture the benefits of multimedia UC than ever before. Before they decide how to best capitalize on the power of SBC, however, IT and business managers must first identify the existing and potential use cases for voice, data and video communications within their companies. They should give special attention to the permutations and business value of videocon-ferencing, which is rapidly evolving in a world of smartphones, mobile workers and new technologies and standards.
Once an organization understands how to best leverage multimedia UC, it needs to determine how to most effectively bring SBC functionality into its UC solutions. Some companies may decide to purchase and install their own SBC equipment on-site, while others will tap the SBC functionality their network service provider partners offer in the cloud. Whatever route they take, organizations will find that multimedia SBCs can help them reach their UC destinations much more rapidly. Once there, by effectively and securely adding videoconferencing to the UC portfolio, organizations can finally begin to realize the many business benefits that true multimedia UC has long promised. n
