 | Issue: | Latin America 2008 |
| Article no.: | 9 | |
| Topic: | Mobile unified communications for the enterprise | |
| Author: | Gerhard Otterbach | |
| Title: | Chief Market Operations Officer | |
| Organisation: | Siemens Enterprise Communications | |
| PDF size: | 319KB |
About author
Gerhard Otterbach is the Chief Market Operations Officer at Siemens Enterprise Communications. He served previously as the divisional head of Enterprise Services at Siemens Communications and as the head of Shared IT Services and CIO of the Siemens ICN Operating Group. Prior to Siemens, Mr Otterbach led the Technology, Innovation and Payment Transaction Management Division at Dresdner Bank. Earlier, at Gesellschaft für Zahlungssysteme (GZS), a payroll systems company, Mr Otterbach headed the accounting systems department after having first focused on organization and IT project management, and general IT Management. Mr Otterbach began his career in the civil service and the tourism office of the German Federal government in charge of organization and IT project management.
Article abstract
Unified communications (UC) improve the efficiency and productivity of the organisation. Presence is the key to UC; it indicates the availability of each employee and specifies the types of communications (voice, video conference, email, text message, etc.) that can reach them at the moment. Users can also define their availability to specific individuals or categories of people (boss, customer, internal, family…). By adding mobility to UC, the same facilities a worker has in the office become available in the field.
Full Article
Unified communications (UC), and the ability to extend that flexible communications environment to mobile users, promises to provide a major productivity boost for enterprise organizations. While many IT professionals still confuse UC with the earlier definition of unified messaging, the vision of UC has progressed far beyond that. UC now encompasses the idea of integrating all enterprise communications onto a common dashboard that would allow a user to view to their contacts and identify their ‘presence’ status. Mobile unified communications describes the ability to extend those rich communication capabilities to mobile users. Presence is key to unified communications allowing users to indicate their availability status including in/out of office, in a meeting, at a remote site, on vacation, and specify the types of communications they can accept (voice, video conference, email, text message, etc.). The user’s presence would be updated automatically from their calendar, and a rules-based engine would allow them to define different levels of availability for different contacts (boss, customer, internal, family, etc.). So the concept of unified now relates to both incoming and outgoing communications, in all media, as well as the integration of applications and their interfaces all in a single platform. Along with its enhanced user features, UC also encompasses the idea of communications enabled business processes that integrates rich communications functions to streamline routine business tasks. So UC today is about the ability to integrate all of an organization’s human and IT resources, and a mobile capability that will extend those resources to all users regardless of where they are located. Mobile UC With unified communications, an organization can provide an infrastructure that supports new ways of doing business that are more efficient, more responsive, and ultimately more productive. The core benefits of mobile UC are: – Presence provides the ability to determine in real time which resources are available for what types of communications, while allowing individual users ability to manage and control their availability.; – Accessibility – UC can make all of an organization’s human and information resources available for appropriate contacts regardless of whether they are at their desks, down the hall, or on another continent; – Productivity – UC lets individual users better manage their time and the communications. At a macro level, better-integrated, more functional, communications allow organizations to be more flexible, agile, and responsive; and – Security and control – Correctly implemented, mobile UC also gives organizations the ability to control their communications access by ensuring that all incoming calls can be directed to the correct people wherever they may be. Furthermore, UC guarantees those rich communications capabilities can be extended to remote users without jeopardizing the security of sensitive corporate information. Implementing mobile UC As business organizations become more mobile, enterprises are finding that they must extend the reach of their communications networks. The goal of a mobile UC solution is to provide accessibility and enhanced productivity regardless of the mobile employee’s location while maintaining enterprise-grade security and control. Wireless networks have made it possible to mobilize UC, however mobility requirements vary. Some users may move about within the office or campus while others may roam nationwide or worldwide. Two types of wireless networks are available to address those differing requirements: wireless LANs and cellular services. Wireless LAN limits the range of the coverage, but once the network is installed, usage is essentially free. Cellular services can extend to mobile users nationwide and potentially worldwide, but that ubiquitous access entails service charges. To get the best of both, enterprises are pursuing fixed mobile convergence (FMC) solutions that provide the ability to integrate public cellular with private wired and wireless networks. The most basic FMC solution is simultaneous ring, where the customer’s telephone system or PBX is programmed to dial the user’s cell phone number any time a call is placed to their desk set. The call rings on both devices and when the user answers one, the ringing is stopped on the other. While not very elegant, simultaneous ring provides mobile accessibility and single number availability, while allowing the organization to maintain control of the telephone number. The more widely recognized implementation is mobile-to-mobile convergence where users are equipped with dual mode Wi-Fi/cellular handsets and the ability to transfer calls between the networks. A mobility controller on the PBX monitors whether users are reachable over the wireless LAN. If the user is in the office, the PBX delivers the call over the WLAN. If the user is out, the system routes the call to their cellular number. State-of-the-art solutions can hand off an active call from one network to the other without interrupting the connection. The initial FMC solutions focused solely on handing off voice calls, but more advanced implementations are now extending the whole UC experience to the FMC-enabled mobile user. With a mobile UC capability, rather than simply relaying voice calls, the network can provide the mobile user with a presence-enabled directory so they can view all of their contacts on the mobile device along with their availability status. From there they would be able to send a text message, an email, establish a voice call, or set up a conference with virtually the same ease as when at their desk. In short, mobile UC is the application, and FMC provides a more flexible and cost effective infrastructure to deliver it. Why delay? Unified communications is taking root in enterprises today, and the extension of UC capabilities to mobile workers is a natural progression. The dynamic nature of business today is driving greater reliance on mobility and the vision of the all-wireless enterprise is quickly being realized. The recognition that functionally integrated communications are critically important to mobile personnel is driving mobile UC. As business organizations become more fluid, mobile UC can provide greater flexibility, productivity and cost savings for the enterprise.
