Virtualisation & Cloud Communicating
Posted by Campbell Williams | 25 Feb 2010
Category: Cloud Communicating
In the first couple of months of the year we've had roadmap briefings from two titans of the comms industry: Avaya and Mitel. Two very different journeys to subtly different destinations, but three marker posts are common to both roadmaps:
- Virtualisation of platforms
- Centralisation, potentially in the cloud
- SIP services will be the glue
Avaya's Aura platform is essentially a "marketecture", in that it's an umbrella term for their unified communications suite, most of which already existed. There are two new components, both relating to delivery. The first of these is a new virtualised platform, allowing all Aura software components to be collapsed onto a single server for up to 1,000 users. The virtualisation trend is clear. The second element is Aura Session Manager, which will allow multi-site enterprise to centralise and consolidate the "brains" of their IP telephony infrastructure onto one platform, with SIP gateways connecting the remote sites. And that platform can reside in one site or in the telco cloud.
On the Mitel side, they've decoupled the call control - now known as "Mitel Communications Director" or MCD - from the 3300 platform and can now deliver it in a variety of different ways:
- On a standard 3300 ICP
- On industry-standard servers in a virtualised environment
- In "Multi-instance Communications Director" (MiCD) mode
For virtualisation, they've partnered with VMware to do so. Intuitively, it seems like they've nailed their strategy; if you're going to go down the virtualisation road, working with the world-leading, 89% market share boasting, pioneer of the industry makes perfect sense.
MiCD is a high-end, telco play, but the same trend is evident. It doesn't matter what platform you'd like your MCD 4.1 call control delivered on (3300, virtual servers or MiCD), it can sit in the cloud or in your offices. And you can still have a mix of centralised and distributed platforms and gateways.
For both Avaya and Mitel, when you add SIP trunks to the mix, we can have an IP telephony delivery model with zero hardware, except phones (and with softphones and FMC softclients, they're only optional!).
"Cloud Communicating" gives you the benefits of hosting without the drawbacks of hosted:
- You retain the assets and control
- Uniform dial plan across all sites
- Centralised SIP trunking
- Elimination/rationalisation of incoming lines
- Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
- IP applications delivery mechanism
- A platform for full IP/UC migration
- Burstable voice and data connections
I won't pretend that this stuff is easy. You'll need a partner who understands IP telephony, unified communications, wide area networks and SIP trunking, and who has their supply chain ducks in a row, because the "single vendor solution" in this world is a complete myth. The integration challenges are considerable but the cost and user benefits are enormous.
