UC
Despite falling or flat budgets for the vast majority of companies two areas continue to gain significant interest (and dollars): Unified communications and virtualization. While the two technologies aren’t really all that related, and are typically managed by different groups within IT, there are some intersection points that are worth noting, and that will drive the need for close collaboration between collaboration and server/application managers.
Virtualization as a platform for UC.
More than 97% of companies are now adopting virtualization for at least part of their application servers. The reasons are well established; lower operating costs, lower hardware costs, greater flexibility to support new applications, and lower administration requirements. Within the UC market, the last year has seen a number of vendors such as Avaya, Mitel and Siemens port their call and application control applications to run on virtualized servers (or appliances). We expect this trend to accelerate in 2011. This trend will continue to result in growing opportunities to reduce operating and capital costs associated with UC deployments. But again, UC architects must carefully work with their data center counterparts to ensure that virtualization architectures can support the needs of UC applications in terms of scale, latency, and capacity.
Virtualization as an obstacle to UC
It’s strange that a technology that offers so many clear benefits can act as a significant obstacle for those crafting UC architectures. But that’s the reality when it comes to desktop virtualization. Approximately 74% of companies are now deploying or planning to deploy desktop virtualization – replacing PCs and thick clients with thin screen devices or screen-scrape applications. Like sever virtualzation, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) offers significant opportunities to reduce capital and operational costs, improve flexibility and agility, and speed application deployment. But while the concept of running applications in the cloud makes sense from the application manager’s perspective, VDI creates challenges for UC since localized encapsulation of voice and video is typically a requirement to meet latency challenges. Thus, bandwidth and hardware savings achieved by VDI are potentially offset by the need to deploy devices or software that supports voice/video needs.
And here again it’s important for UC and VDI teams to closely coordinate. In our last round of research, for example, we talked to one firm that had to scrap its UC softphone/desktop video plans after learning that they were incompatible with a decision already made to convert all desktops to VDI.
Bottom line: proactive, rather than reactive coordination is required to realize virtualization’s benefits and minimize challenges.
