UC
It’s hard to have any discussion around IT these days without talking about “the cloud”, this mysterious blob that will seemingly suck up any and all IT resources into one giant singularity in the not-so-distant future. But what exactly is “the cloud” and why should those responsible for UC planning within their organizations care? Talk to anyone involved in data center planning and “cloud” is all the rage. Here most define “cloud” as general purpose, virtualized computing environment in which applications run on hypervisors from vendors including Cisco, Citrix, Microsoft, and VMware. By moving to a virtualized approach, companies have saved money in terms of hardware, maintenance, cooling, power, and operational administration. The benefits of the cloud are well established, which is why 93% of companies according to our latest research have begun an implementation. Cloud now extends to the public realm through something called “infrastructure as a service” or “IaaS”. This “public” cloud offering from vendors including Amazon, AT&T, GoGrid, Rackspace, and Verizon provides a hosted cloud service; simply move your applications into the public cloud and then you don’t even have to buy your own hypervisor or servers. So why is the cloud this important to UC planners? Simply because moving UC applications onto the same virtualized infrastructure as other applications offers similar potential for savings, flexibility, and resiliency. Often the biggest complaint we hear from UC planners is the sheer volume of servers and interconnections between servers that they must maintain to deliver telecom services to their users. The term “server bunny farm” comes up a lot, especially for large global companies leveraging a regional approach for their UC architecture. Some vendors such as Avaya (via the former Nortel CS2100), Broadsoft, and Siemens have long touted the opportunities to reduce hardware investments by adopting carrier-grade telephony solutions, now cloud-based approaches have the potential to help companies realize these same savings without the need for a replacement of existing infrastructure. We’re still in the infancy of moving UC to the cloud. Microsoft supports OCS 2007 in the coud, but only for non-real-time applications (no voice/video). Mitel and Siemens recently made announcements allowing their call control platforms to live in the cloud. We expect to see significant growth in cloud-based approaches from other systems vendors, as well as service providers looking to add cloud-based services to their portfolios.
