“The second half of the year is typically stronger for the Enterprise Voice market, and the third quarter of this year was no exception for the Unified Communications segment,” commented Alan Weckel, Director at Dell’Oro Group. “Although we expect vendors to experience strong fiscal year-end results in the fourth quarter of 2009 and 2010, we do not expect vendors’ fiscal year-ends to be as strong as they were prior to 2008 for quite some time,”

Things are growing, but we’re still a way off the boom years of VoIP. The gradual migration continues, and the leading players remain much the same.

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I am of the view that effective communication and collaboration tools are the best competitive weapon that any business can have. As the description of the webinar said, “[they] overcome the technology walls between organizations, while preserving security.”

Unified Communications, which is really something of an umbrella term, is starting to pull together the various communications channels that exist in a business. One of the exciting developments is that new advanced features, such as presence information (so that you can see if I am available before you waste your time trying to call me), has the potential to be federated (joined up – see this post) across different businesses, or at least across different business units.

David Knight, Director of Product Management for WebEx, ran through the WebEx infrastructure – the data centres and interconnects, and how they monitor and manage it all. This MediaTone network, which is the backbone for Webex, was discussed in reasonable detail. It comprises 9 global datacenters, connected via a real-time optimized network.

One of the challenges of any Internet based service is that, no matter how good the application provider’s networks, you are still at the mercy of the ISP providing you access – something to bear in mind when choosing your ISP.

Cisco have now added Wiki functionality into the team space offering (a nice way to reduce email dependency), which is good to see. Wiki’s are an excellent way to collect and consolidate information. The team room can be customized (there is a widget framework to enable custom collaborative applications).

The webinar also featured a section on the Cisco Learning Network and Cisco professional certifications. That sight, slightly amusingly, seems to be hosted by collaboration software provider Jive Software. Anyway, the learning network is looking for the next real IT star to build a documentary around, following their path to certification. It will be a talent competition, complete with audience voting. A chance for 15 minutes of fame for the backroom guys.

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Talking earlier this month with Bill Beverley, Security Manager at F5 Networks, F5′s focus is clear: “deploying applications is really the central role of IT”. That’s certainly part of it. Keeping them up and running is too, and that has been bread and butter business for F5, delivering kit to put in front of servers to deal with the peaks in capacity and inevitable server failures.

Load balancing provides availability, but acceleration and optimization are also key in today’s infrastructures. That has made WAN optimization a hot area, especially now that bandwidth prices are no longer falling rapidly. Bill talked about how F5 are adding extra layers of security for web applications, something that is big in PCI and compliance driven environments. F5 see their solutions as complementary to the network firewalls, with the firewall dealing with the high-load, low-intelligence packet filtering. As Bill was keen to point out, “if you have a really efficient smaller piece of kit doing that job, then we can deal with traffic in an effective and more intelligent way.”

F5 boxes terminate the TCP connection and then regenerate it out of the other side. Since the devices have application-level visibility into the application streams, this is the perfect place to apply application acceleration and application security magic. However, this isn’t going to be a clean battle. The traditional firewall players like Cisco, Juniper Networks and Checkpoint, are keen for a piece of the action too.

A battle is brewing between the folks coming from the application towards the network, and the network folks heading up the stack to optimize applications. On the application side, F5 might be the baby gorilla, but there are a number of chimps ready to fight it out with them. Database security has seen specialist players like Secerno emerge. In talking to Bill about SQL security, his comment was “I think you will see consolidation in that area.” I wouldn’t take that as a statement that F5 is feeling acquisitive (although they have been), but rather that smaller players will get swept up or washed away in the coming quarters.

Hosting and data centres are becoming more and more sophisticated environments, as you can see from the diagram. Layers have been added to the network to provide security, then availability, and now application acceleration. Those layers are spreading in their functionality too, with SSL VPN being added to the security layer, and storage virtualization added into availability. The latter will help many IT managers to clear up the NAS(ty) mess on the network, by balancing across multiple NAS devices, and migrating data at rest to slower storage devices.

F5 solutions are purchased as a mixture of sticking plaster remedies and strategic design, where acceleration and availability are part of the fundamental architecture, rather than an add on when capacity gets exceeded. F5 have some interesting developments coming down the line in the virtualization space. Because they see the application performance, then can provide feedback into VMotion / ESX running on the servers, to tell it to provision extra servers or deprovision them. The integration works through SNMP and SYSLOG, so could potentially be open to other vendor combinations too. Certainly lots for F5′s channel partners to apply their expertise to.

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David Kelly - Meru Networks

Meru have differentiated themselves by focussing on large, high-density WiFi deployments. Their technology reduces the issues of PCs handing off from one access point to another. You can argue the benefits of that for data, after all, how often do you walk around whilst surfing with your PC? But for Voice over WiFi it become more essential. Even when PCs are static, there are benefits in balancing load across different access points.

So, why are Meru both unheard of and much talked about? The answer lies in their users base, which tends to be formed from people who are experienced WiFi users. The majority of people I encounter who are into their ‘second phase’ of deployment are aware of Meru and considering them. This makes sense when you think about it: For a small scale deployment, there are a large range of vendors who can provide a working solution. When it comes to scaling, it is a completely different matter.

Meru have a big push on 802.11n technology. 802.11n has been spinning around the standards bodies for far too long, but will hopefully emerge, fully ratified, this year. The general view, including that of Meru Networks, is that any changes to the standard between now and then will be addressable via a software upgrade.

I’d always viewed 802.11n as a consumer technology, because that is where the bulk of the noise about it has been :- extending WiFi range in the home, dealing with interference etc… However the technology is just as applicable in the Enterprise, and this is where the Meru folks are pushing it.

By deploying access points delivering standard 802.11b/g, which can be converted to n, you get a degree of future proofing. The Meru solution is nice in that you can use b, g or n and still deliver the appropriate speed to users (it isn’t dragged down by the lowest common denominator).

Going back to Gartner again, they position Meru as a 4th generation, single cell architecture, with the intelligence in the access point. This takes away the drop off during access point hand over, and allows the layering of networks (read Gartner’s full piece here).  

Meru’s David Kelly was keen to stress their push into the UK and Europe. The company has a strong customer base in the US, including education (where user mobility is exceptionally high), health care and government. They are now repeating that success over here.

“Unleash the users and let them go,” says David. And why not? The traditional security concerns about WiFi are receding, with enhanced encryption and dedicated security capabilities such as Meru’s “AirShield 2.0″ (I’m not making that name up! read for yourself).

Meru use air time fairness to share bandwidth between different users, protecting VoFi (voice over WiFi) calls, and controlling would-be bandwidth hogs. Applications also include retail and distribution, as more and more data terminals have WiFi capability built in. If you are looking to refresh your WiFi deployment, or going straight to large scale WiFi use, Meru Networks is definitely worth checking out.

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Russ Kirk of Grey Convergence

There are very few people who know Microsoft’s OCS product well, and even fewer with real life experience of using it. Grey’s skills cover Unified Communications, collaboration and identity management. These are not such odd bed fellows, since OCS delivers collaboration, and none of this stuff works without a decent user store (hence the requirement for identity skills).

Grey were an Parlano partner before Microsoft purchased that outfit, to flesh out their persistent messaging portfolio. Talking with Russ, it was clear that Grey position themselves as IP telephony agnostic, working with Cisco, Nortel, Mitel and Ericsson.

They see a strong ROI-based deployment model of unified communications, but one that isn’t limited to softphones. Russ was quick to point out that Microsoft do a hard phone as well as their software client. Many businesses want to remove their reliance on the phone handset – a notoriously high cost item – but more importantly, HR departments want to get users away from a fixed desk mindset. UC somes as part of a later HR-driven change agenda, moving away from the traditional fixed desk, complete with family photo.

Taking that a stage further, and thinking about road warriors, UC is competing on the handset (in Windows Mobile devices), and also with mobile voice quality. Microsoft are careful to position the two types of voice as complementary, and Grey follow that line. As a side note, research shows a strong relationship between utility, convenience and voice quality. Get the first two right, and quality is less of an issue, or visa versa.

Road warriors are the easy win for UC, says Russ, but the 9-5 desk folks benefit from integration too (click to call):

“There is enough benefit there to justify deployments, without even looking to road warriors”

With a built in directory (hence Grey’s focus on ID management), user’s workflow is improved. Future applications can build on that too. There is a word of caution in this area from Russ:

“people want to run before they can walk… they want to do all of the application integration and get the benefits as soon as they have done their first deployment… …You need to take a busines consultancy, change management approach. Get  the infrastrcture right and build from there…”

Very valid opinion, especially considering that many businesses don’t even have a remote working policy in place. Grey focus on mid-size financials, accountants and lawyers, government and education. Typical deployments have 10,000s of thousands of users. Microsoft OCS still makes sense for businesses with 50 users and up, but more so in the mid-hundreds of users.

I asked Russ why a business should think about a third party like Grey, rather than managing the deployment in house. He pointed out that for 500 or so users they have a quick start package. This gives a fixed price, from install onwards, and is most cost effective than working with a traditional systems integrator. They hand hold the migration, based on expertise gained with 8 years of doing IPT deployments. The migration is the tricky bit, and uses one-time skills. Making the go live a success is essential, especially when it comes to telephony.

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VMWare’s recent woes are well documented, a recent article on The Register gives a taster. Executive shuffles and iffy patches certainly haven’t helped the company’s image in recent times. But it isn’t all doom and gloom. The new CEO has been well received in some quarters and they have also announced a collaboration with Cisco to accelerate the virtualization of the data center.

The benefits of server virtualization are fairly widely understood (some of the main points were touched on in the “data center efficiency” post here a while back). Many people are also using VMWare on the desktop too, generally to support multiple operating systems at once. It is a big win for IT staff and programmers who have to cross between different platforms to get their jobs done. Virtualizing the OS means you get to work from one machine, but can quickly switch operating systems as and when you need to.

Things haven’t stood still on the server side though. The latest version of VMWare Fusion lets you go headless, meaning that the virtual machine has no consoles connected to it. Very useful in the data centre.

VMWare is also hooking itself to the Cloud, but not irrevocably so. Whilst they have strong competition, their technology remains strong. They know their space well and have responded to the challenges their users face.

With the introduction of new technologies such as VMotion (nicely explained in the depths of James Urquhart’s post on the VMWare and Cisco initiative) and vStorage, to go with vCloud – you get vNaming idea, right? – they continue to push the virtualization envelope.

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Nokia has been pushing the envelope on the Fixed-Mobile Convergence front for quite a whole. For those who’ve missed out on the wild excitement of FMC and UMA, it is a vision that would see fixed and mobile voice coming together. Something that would actually be an exciting development for office telephony. The architectures usually employ Wi-Fi to bridge the final gap between the fixed office LAN and the mobile handset – which also opens up the potential for using public Wi-Fi hotspots (QoS permitting).

Image seemlessly switching between a GSM Mobile call and the same call via Wi-Fi onto the office LAN. Of course there is a fly in the ointment: It is a touchy subject for both mobile operators and business users. Calls over the LAN to another user on the network are free, obviously. Calls over the GSM network aren’t. As is often the case, one person’s cost saving is another’s revenue loss. In this case, the mobile carrier, and that is one of the potential big issues with FMC. And the man in the middle? Well, unsurprisingly it is the handset vendors. Back to Nokia.

Handsets like Nokia’s N95 enable VoIP  as well as GSM calls. It’s not as seemless as it could be yet, but there are some very interesting apps out there. Take Fring as an example, it also includes instant messaging capabilities and Skype. Before you it out of the window as too consumer, think about the cost savings of IM and VoIP against your business mobile bills.

However, it seems that new Nokia handsets, like the N78, are missing this functionality. Garrett Smith, VoIP insider picks up the story:

This is a sticky situation for Nokia (and other handset manufacturers) since both the carriers and the carriers customers are Nokia’s customers; each of whom want something different. Nokia obviously played it safe with this move, siding with the carrier…

Garrett posted a further update today, after Nokia’s PR company touched base with him. The whole situation is complicated further by the desktop telephony vendors, who will want a slide of the action too. Cisco has Wi-Fi handsets and others are making a play for the convergence space too. Somehow all of this has to glue together, and suddenly you are bumping into the world of unified communications. It’s a big piece of pie to swallow.

You can obviously still install 3rd party apps to give VoIP on the handset, providing the network operator doesn’t block VoIP, but that it far from an integrated solution. Ultimately, as a business user, minimum overall cost and complexity are key.

In Europe, especially in the scandinavian countries, mobile voice has existed in the office in the form of DECT phones for quite some time. Reduced wiring costs and increased mobility for users are just some of the benefits. The magic will happen when it all gets down to one handset. One that will work outside of the office as well as inside, giving the full deskphone experience.

That’s still a way off, and by the look of Nokia’s new handsets, it is potentially getting further away…

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Last year Gartner put IT on a par with the airline industry for CO2 footprint (“Green IT: Why it matters” ZDNet). Environmental issues, driven by the Corporate Social Responsibility agenda, are making people to think hard about that power use. But using less energy also saves money, and that is good business sense as much as environmental sensitivity.

Energy is a big ticket item for IT. Cooling uses as much, or more, power as servers themselves, which is creating a spiraling demand. Virtualization has got a new lease of life, speaking a new coat of green paint. It reduces the number of servers and their power usage. VMWare’s Rob Smoot talked though server virtualisation, and also the benefits of virtualization for the desktop. Thin clients reduce power and extend desktop machines life. Sun was ahead of the times after all.

Robb Boyd quotes Doug Gourlay on the history of constraints: first we were space constrained, then cooling constrained and now we are power constrained. Rob Aldrich - Cisco’s Mr Green – focussed on efficiency and sustainability, putting ‘green’ to one side as a politically loaded term. A good point, and a neat angle to follow.

The number of apps and the amount of data will continue to grow (The Exploding Digital Universe). The slight curve ball is where cloud computing plays into this. However, that moves the problem, rather than fixes it. The fact is, it is time to look carefully at IT power consumption, if you aren’t already.

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