Now that voice has become just another application on the network, brace yourself for a slew of new communication apps.
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The day is near when VoIP will be as ubiquitous as the Internet itself. Sure, issues aplenty must be solved first – e911, quality of service, the political rift between telecom and datacom staff. But as traditional PBX switch vendors begin rolling out their own VoIP offerings, and yes, even evangelizing them, few now can doubt VoIP’s trajectory.
The time has come to ask what happens after IP becomes the standard for voice transport. The answer, in short, is new applications. Think of it – when voice is just another packet on your network, not only will the network be converged, but so will the devices. You then will treat voice like any other mission-critical application in the new data center.
Joan Vandermate, Siemens vice president of product development, offers the example of opening a new office. No longer will users have to choose between deploying a PBX/key system – because all sites need their own – or Centrex. With VoIP in the new data center, network executives instead will roll out voice as a service. They simply will install a VoIP gateway on the premises, and presto – “everyone’s on one, big, virtual system. In much the way you deploy SAP or any mission-critical application [you don’t deploy SAP at every site], you would do for voice. You would put voice applications in the data center and simply deploy them as data services or even as [outsourced] managed services. You deploy [the PBX] inside the glass house and administer it there – whether you have one campus or 10,000 sites,” Vandermate says.
With that in mind, the time has come for network executives to begin plotting business applications enabled by this new-data-center-style voice. Experts say the following applications – which were previously cost-prohibitive or just plain impossible – will become widely adopted.
Voice with presence. This is a super-sized version of the “work anywhere” feature that VoIP users already enjoy. VoIP users can tote a laptop with a soft phone to home or hotel, and when they fire up their VPN connections, bang, they’re on the voice network. Such mobility is one of the primary reasons a VoIP installation is underway at the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB), says Rick Tillotson, telecom manager for the Austin organization.
VoIP greatly will improve voice service for the roughly 40 TASB employees who either travel or telework part time. “They’ll have three different numbers – for their office, home and cell phones – and customers are having to dial three numbers just to reach someone. Call a home number, and calls don’t roll to anyone live – that’s horrible, that’s caveman call-handling. We want to treat employees [always] like they are across the hall – transfer calls, have one voice mail box – that’s the No. 1 advantage we find when we go to VoIP,” Tillotson says.
With the addition of presence, which vendors already have begun to integrate into their products, users get fine-tuned, call-routing control. They’ll be able to set their presence information to tell the IP PBX and other users which callers are allowed to reach them, when and how – via voice or by instant messaging, for example.
A user could set a device to accept only instant messages during a meeting except if a customer calls, in which case the call would ring through.
Such an application would be a natural fit for TASB, Tillotson says. He has enabled presence in the call center, via Siemens ProCenter Agile product. “Empowering agents is huge. They can now see who else is logged in and what their status is. They are no longer standing up and shouting out to the [agents monitoring the] queue, ‘Can I go to bathroom?’ ” he says. Rather, all agents can check the queue themselves to see how many callers are waiting, then look at the icon list and see the availability of their co-workers – with out-of-office icons being specific enough for agents to know when to expect the agent’s return (vacation, bathroom, printer). “If they see four agents left and four people in the queue, they know it’s not a good time to go on break,” he adds.
Presence has been such a boon to the call center that Tillotson can imagine making it available to all employees once VoIP is fully rolled out. TASB’s staged rollout is planned over the next two years, he says.
Presence-aware VoIP applications are becoming available now for use outside the call center, as long as callers are on one VoIP system. Products that offer various presence-enabled capabilities include Alcatel’s 4980 soft phone, Avaya’s Converged Communications Server, Mitel Networks’ Your Assistant Pro 3.0, Nortel’s Multimedia Communication Server 5100, ShoreTel’s Call Manager and Siemens’ OpenScape VoIP application suite.
Click to conference. In addition to letting users set their call-routing options, presence naturally will lead to more advanced functions. One such emerging application is “click to conference,” such as offered in Mitel’s Your Assistant Pro.
Click to conference is “an incredible productivity enhancement. It is changing the way people do business,” says Ed Mier, founder of testing specialist Miercom and a Network World Lab Alliance partner. “It’s now possible for workgroups – five to 10 people – to maintain a visual indication of where the other members are and their availability. It eliminates phone tag, and taking three days to set up a conference call. You can look at your screen and see that four of the five people you need are available now.” For instance, with Your Assistant Pro 3.0, an end user would initiate the call by simply dragging and dropping icons into a conference screen. When the phone rings, the four people available for the call automatically would be conferenced in. An icon for the fifth person would indicate expected availability time. “You can’t do that in a non-VoIP environment,” Mier says.
Click to talk. VoIP also will be the impetus that makes the “click to talk” concept introduced during the Internet bubble days a reality. While VoIP connectivity needs to be more widespread among consumers before companies can interact with their Web visitors this way, creative VoIP users already have begun experimenting. The Bahá’í National Center, the U.S. headquarters for the nation’s Bahá’í houses of worship, is building a quasi click-to-talk system that will integrate with its public-facing Web site, says John Fletcher, CIO for the Wilmette, Ill., nonprofit.
The organization staffs a far-flung cadre of call-center volunteers. (This, too, VoIP has made possible. These volunteers can work part time from their homes anywhere in the country, while the IP PBX easily routes calls, Fletcher says.) His staff is writing an application that will let Web site visitors who wish to talk to a live person initiate a phone call. The visitor would enter a phone number, and a call-center employee would call back nearly immediately. The application will perform a look-up of the call-queue time – information the ShoreTel IP PBX already gathered for incoming calls. In this way, the Web site can tell the interested visitor that a Bahá’í representative will call back in x number of minutes. “There isn’t a whole lot to it. Our programmers are writing the interface between the [ShoreTel] system and the Web site,” he says.
As services evolve that let consumers use VoIP more widely, real “click to talk” will evolve, too, eliminating the call-back process. Standards for service and device compatibility are important, too. Most in the industry are looking toward the IETF’s Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as the enabling standard.
“SIP has a window of opportunity over the next 18 months to become the ubiquitous IP communication standard and is very much in the public domain,” Mier says. He points out that vendors’ acceptance of SIP ranges from implementing it in their phones/soft phones (Avaya) to architectural-level support (Nortel).
But others are not so sure that SIP will win. SIP is too “heavyweight and clumsy” for handheld devices, says Ed Basart, CTO for ShoreTel. The IEEE’s older H.323 remains in the protocol-of-choice race and eyes also are watching the Media Gateway Control Protocol (also known as MGCP or Megaco). The IETF and ITU jointly created the MGCP.
Regardless of the choice, vendors seem willing to support standards for IP telephony, rather than implement only via proprietary methods. That is a positive sign for click-to-talk and other applications for reaching consumers.
The always-present expert. Consumers aside, combine presence with the click-to-talk concept and you wind up with an application called “Ask the Expert,” Basart says. This lets front-desk or call-center employees be in constant contact with high-paid knowledge workers. Basart offers the example of an investment bank. When a major customer calls with a question on the account, if that customer can’t be routed directly to the broker, the call would go to another knowledge worker who has the expertise to answer the question. No voice mails, no phone tag, no forcing the customer off on a live call-center person who can do nothing more than take a message.
The device-smart app. Another application a presence-aware IP PBX eventually might support is device smarts, Basart says. “My fantasy is not that you add voice to an application but that you add applications to your voice calls,” he says. “I get excited to think about it. This will make a telephone call far more simple; you can just share something on a screen.”
Some of the communications suites vendors offer today let users on the same IP PBX drag-and-drop a file to share it with other callers, or to launch a whiteboard. This is a productivity booster, eliminating the hoopla required to e-mail presentations and materials ahead of time, users and experts agree. But that’s not the real trick. Basart foresees a device-smart application in which the voice system would detect the data capabilities of the devices on the call, and automatically modify data files to fit the user interface.
For instance, a conference leader using a PC could tell that three others on the call were also on their PCs but that one participant was using a PDA/cell phone. If the leader wanted to send a full-blown spreadsheet or presentation during the call, he would know that the PC users could view the entire file while the PDA/cell phone could see a reduced version that the IP PBX automatically formatted for the smaller screen.
Voice control, integrated lookups and beyond. Other applications will become popular business tools with the mass adoption of VoIP, too. These include voice control and integrated directory lookups.
With all the hardware fully capable and users trained to use data devices for voice calls, speech recognition applications seem a natural next move, says Naresh Lakhanpal, a national director of business innovation for Deloitte & Touche. “Voice interaction is going to be big. ‘Get me this document.’ Taking this to the extreme, you’ll have the ability to interact with an electronic agent that understands voice commands and can go perform tasks,” Lakhanpal says.
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In fact, the Ray and Maria Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently demonstrated just such an agent. The agent was a computer-generated image of a woman that performed database look-up tasks via conversational speech. She was so life-like, some attendees initially thought they were viewing a video.
Less sexy, but a nice productivity booster all the same, will be integrated directory lookups where users, via keyboard or speech recognition, can initiate communication – be it a call or e-mail/instant message by entering the person’s name. Calendaring, too, would be integrated.
And then, TASB’s Tillotson envisions the day when these two apps combine, and all the world’s data is accessible with a voice query. Equipped with a wearable device that recognizes only the user’s voice, the user would be able to make database queries that are presented via a screen image projected into the air, he says. “I’ve seen this stuff in labs. . . . If you’re at a party and can’t remember a restaurant, you can find it immediately – it will be integrated into our lives.”
Perhaps one day the motto for VoIP will be: Don’t leave home without it.
