Convergence may be inevitable, but the Bell heads aren't holding their breath. "Once the data people really get into understanding both the complexity of voice applications and the 100% uptime requirements, it's going to be awhile before they decide to get into convergence on any large scale," says Wendy Noel, U.S. telecommunications specialist for Nova Chemicals in Pittsburgh.
Ruth Michaelecki, director of telecommunications and information systems at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, agrees that voice people are currently more dubious than threatened. "And rightly so. Practically every week, someone puts out a notice saying that the data network is going to be down for a certain number of hours on a certain day. That is not acceptable in the voice world."
While the data equipment vendors tout next-generation switches that can meet the "four nines" up-time requirement of the voice infrastructure, such reliability is not much in evidence on data networks.
"I've been in this business more than 34 years, and I've literally seen grown men cry when they can't get dial tone," says Noel. "But when the computer network goes down, they just take a coffee break. There is a level of expectation that the data crowd just isn't ready to face."
Air Products & Chemicals Inc. in Allentown, Pa., has been aggressively cross-training voice people for a converged future, but "future" is the operative word.
"The market hype about VoIP is way head of reality," says Virgil Palmer, director of global telecommunications and networking services for the multinational manufacturer. "Right now, the technology is just for small operations. When you have tens of thousands of users, scalability is still very much an issue."
While Bell heads remain implacably skeptical of today's data infrastructure, they can be won over to the concept of convergence at a higher level.
"Once the telecom people see the advantages of making voice a data application, they buy into it," says Prasad Ravi, director of networks and telecommunications at Rush Presbyterian St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago. "They can sit down at a browser and reconfigure phones, and the self-help features for users free them up from a lot of tedious tasks so they can focus on more important things."
The Bell heads actually have less of a leap to make than their data counterparts, telecommunications managers insist, because the voice side is more converged today than the data side. PBXes are now servers running multiple applications, and functions such as voicemail, interactive voice response, and automatic call distribution have been "outboarded" to specialized servers. Consequently, the voice people are more prepared for the new order than their data counterparts, and should look forward to it with confidence.
