Clouds, VoIP and Unified Communications
by Andrew Mehlman
Clouds, VoIP and Unified Communications
by Andrew Mehlman
What exactly is the cloud?
The challenge for
decision makers is to
first understand what the
cloud really is before they
can understand whether it
makes sense for them.
You can’t have many conversations these days about IT and not have the cloud come
up as part of the discussion—and voice applications are no exception. What strikes
me frequently is the lack of understanding of what this cloud business is all about and
what it really means to business owners, managers, and IT professionals as well as
individual users.
This confusion stems from a lot of misinformation. Depending upon your perspective,
it is either intentional misleading or a misguided effort to comprehensively convey all
the features and benefits. In any case, a lot of money is being invested by a wide range
of providers, and there’s a great deal of effort being made to differentiate one solution
from the other. If you listen to the hype, “moving to the cloud” is the right solution for
all applications and all businesses.
The challenge for decision makers is to first understand what the cloud really is
before they can understand whether it makes sense for them. If you do some basic
web searching, the simplest definition that you’ll find is that the cloud is “a network
of servers.” What you’ll also find is that, although it wasn’t called the cloud back then,
the basic cloud concept goes all the way back to the 1950s…with remote access and
timesharing of mainframe computers. This was done for cost reasons. Mainframes
were too expensive for many companies to acquire and they had limited use, so it was
less expensive to rent time than to buy the technology. As costs came down and usage
went up, most companies ended up buying their own.
I personally don’t go back that far, but in the world of communications technology,
I did see references to and representations of clouds in network diagrams going back
to the 1980s. In spite of what the marketers want you to believe, the concept of clouds
is not new and not revolutionary.
The more you read and the more you listen to all of the different representations of
the cloud, the easier it is to understand why there is as much confusion as there is.
1
Clouds, VoIP and Unified Communications
Today, with so many
suppliers rushing to offer
cloud services and trying to
differentiate their offerings
In fact, the term cloud came into use because it was virtually impossible to explain the
concept simply, so designers and PowerPoint users took to using a picture of a cloud
to represent this rather nebulous concept. Today, with so many suppliers rushing to
offer cloud services and trying to differentiate their offerings by making claims about
why their cloud solution is different and better, it becomes difficult to cut through the
marketing hype to determine which services best fit your organization.
by making claims about
why their cloud solution is
different and better,
it becomes difficult to cut
One of the most important fundamentals to understand is that there is no one cloud.
There are many different clouds and many different types of clouds. There are private
clouds and public clouds, community clouds and distributed clouds. There are clouds
established to provide services and there are clouds that exist simply to get to those
services. And, these clouds are often interconnected and overlapping, resulting in
through the marketing hype
hybrid clouds.
to determine which services
I’ve also heard it said that the cloud and the Internet are the same. The rationale is that
best fit your organization.
the Internet is a network of servers and in today’s world cloud services are typically
associated with Internet services, so therefore, the cloud and the Internet are one
and the same. Although the Internet is a cloud and the largest one at that, it is not
the cloud. Any organization that has deployed a network at more than one location
or supports remote workers already has their own private cloud. Services such as
storage, email, accounting systems, CRM systems and VoIP PBX services are common
applications that have been supported by companies on their private clouds for
many years. Access to these services is often achieved by dedicated circuits, MPLS
(or equivalent ENS or EVPL), or shared network services, which are semi-private clouds
delivered by telecom carriers and cable companies, or alternatively by VPN over the
public Internet cloud.
The buzz today, however, is all about public clouds and specifically cloud computing.
Although consumer email has primarily been based on public clouds – beginning with
companies like AOL and Compuserv – most companies hosted their own email servers,
primarily with Microsoft Exchange. However, for several years now, many companies
have been moving their email services to cloud based services with Google Apps and
Hosted Exchange services, and more recently with Office 365.
Salesforce.com was one of the first major business process applications exclusively
developed as a cloud-only solution. Now just about every application imaginable can
be cloud-based and every software company either has a cloud solution or will very
shortly. And they all want to sell it to you.
2
Clouds, VoIP and Unified Communications
There is no one cloud.
There are many different
clouds and many different
types of clouds.
The big question is: Why? And that depends upon your perspective. For business
owners and managers, there are several primary advantages:
1.
Reduced capital costs—by eliminating purchases of expensive server hardware,
investment can be minimized.
2.
Reliability—although individual servers can be built with redundancy, high
availability and/or in server clusters, the cost to do so can become prohibitive for
an individual organization. Cloud-based services typically are built with this kind
of reliability and the cost is spread amongst all the users.
3.Remote and mobile workers—for companies that support workers outside
of their headquarters, cloud services eliminates the need to establish secure
remote access and reduces the bandwidth requirements at the location to
support these workers.
4.Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity—more and more emphasis is being
placed on having plans in place to recover from a catastrophic event at a
company’s headquarters. By putting services off premise, employees can
be relocated more quickly and/or work from home.
5.Licensing simplicity—there is no need to audit software licenses with cloud
services. As a paid user, you have a license.
6.Upgrades—both the costs and hassle of upgrading server hardware and/or
software applications is eliminated.
7.
Lower support costs—maintaining server hardware and software has become
more and more complex resulting in high support costs, either for in-house
or outsourced support staff. By moving applications to a cloud, these costs
becoming the responsibility of the service provider.
So what’s in it for the software companies and service provider? There are some very
good reasons to sell their applications and services in a subscription model as opposed
to a single license purchase:
1. Recurring Revenue—although software applications have increasingly required
annual support costs, often support would lapse. And when it came time for
upgrades, companies could choose to look at different options. With upgrades
built in and automatic recurring billing, software and service providers have a
much more guaranteed revenue stream than with the traditional purchase and
support model.
2. “ Stickiness”—by eliminating the big capital decisions every 3 – 7 years,
customers are more likely to stay with their current provider. This reduces
sales costs and increases margins.
3.
Easier to support—without having to depend on their customer’s hardware
and variations in hardware, support becomes much simpler.
3
Clouds, VoIP and Unified Communications
Tele- and data
communications have
undergone a
fundamental and
astonishing change
So if there are good reasons for customers to buy cloud services and good reasons
for suppliers to sell them, it’s obvious why it has become such a huge market.
That begs the question: Why not?
The answer to this is specific to the application, the customer’s needs, and long-term
cost. For applications that are very basic and for companies that are unlikely to
experience much change, the long-term subscription costs for cloud-based solutions
can often be much higher than what they have paid for in the past.
in just a little
over a decade.
I run into many customers who are still using old versions of Windows, Exchange and
Microsoft Office, as well as accounting systems and other business process applications
that have been in place for years and are meeting their needs just fine. We have a
good number of customers that have been using the same telephone system for
well over 10 years. In these cases, customers made their capital investments wisely,
paid their annual support costs, and are reaping the benefits of their acquisitions
at a much lower average annual cost than what they will have to pay to replace it with
a subscription service.
Depending upon the application, they may not have a choice other than a cloud
subscription service when it’s time to replace or upgrade an aging application because
suppliers now prefer the subscription model for the reasons noted above and often
no longer offer the traditional model.
Next-Generation Connectivity:
Voice-over-Internet and the unification of everything
Tele- and data communications have undergone a fundamental and astonishing
change in just a little over a decade. Starting in the 1990s, we saw the very beginning
of packetized voice services using ATM and Frame Relay, and what was referred to as
Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) applications. By the late 90s we started to see
Unified Messaging applications that integrated voice, fax and email, and the very early
stages of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). Like many early stage technologies, they
didn’t always work very well and were very costly.
The early 2000s saw VoIP start to evolve in a variety of applications. We saw it in new
phone systems, in both VoIP-only solutions as well as hybrid solutions. We saw carriers
begin to use it for the bandwidth flexibility that it provided, both for customer deliverables
and for backbone transport. Instead of dedicating digital bandwidth to a customer
over a single T1 and inter-city high capacity circuit strictly for voice or strictly for data,
by converting voice to VoIP, bandwidth could be shared and flex to the momentary
demand.
4
Clouds, VoIP and Unified Communications
Unlike email or web surfing,
voice traffic is real-time
data and is highly sensitive
to packet delays, commonly
In the consumer market, we saw the development of companies like Vonage and
Skype that allowed consumers to take advantage of Internet bandwidth that was
getting less expensive to make calls without incurring toll charges. Unfortunately, many
consumers tried to adopt these services and for reasons I will explain later, had poor
success, resulting in a belief that VoIP technology was bad technology, slowing adoption
in both the consumer and corporate world.
referred to as latency.
Many of us knew that it was only a matter of time until VoIP became the primary
protocol used for voice applications, and that there were no fundamental problems
with the technology. It was the application and the implementation of the technology
that created problems. In the corporate world, I saw implementations of VoIP PBX
systems by service companies that had little to no understanding of the underlying
data network communications principles required to guarantee a good experience.
And at the consumer level, people were buying cheap Internet bandwidth running
slow speeds on highly congested networks that not only didn’t provide any quality
guarantees, they actually guaranteed that quality would be poor!
Unfortunately, we’re still seeing this problem all the time in the rapidly growing
Hosted VoIP industry. There are service providers selling their services every day
without addressing the issue of guaranteed quality.
The primary issue is very simple. Unlike email or web surfing, voice traffic is real-time
data and is highly sensitive to packet delays, commonly referred to as latency. We all
experience latency at one time or another, but with most applications you won’t even
notice because they are not real-time and are therefore latency tolerant. I’ve heard
different people state a different amount of latency that is acceptable for voice, but as
someone who expects voice quality, I’m conservative and stay with 100 milliseconds.
Think about that—one tenth of one second—less than the blink of an eye. That’s all it
takes for a voice call to go bad. To compound matters, voice is a 2-way conversation and
therefore requires data to travel in both directions. Many broadband providers have
established their networks to give their users more download bandwidth because for
most people their Internet experience is mostly one-way. They go to a website and the
website sends them information. In addition, inexpensive broadband service providers
aggregate their bandwidth into a neighborhood or community, setting up potential
choke points. So if your neighbors are heavy Internet users, even if there is nothing
else going on at your location, your latency and performance can suffer.
5
Clouds, VoIP and Unified Communications
Unlike basic server
applications like email or
data storage, or familiar
applications like MS Office,
Unified Communications
is an end-user application
that should include
user support.
All of this is referred to as Quality of Service (QoS). And a good level of QoS—low
latency being the primary factor—is absolutely necessary for any VoIP applications to
work properly. But once again, we are seeing cloud providers sell their VoIP services
without emphasizing the importance of QoS.
Why are they doing this? In my estimation, it’s just their business model and it goes
something like this: If we sell services without QoS, then we can provide a cheaper
solution. If we sell cheap, we can sell more. In some cases it will work well most of the time.
For the majority of customers, it will work well enough of the time that they will accept the
reduced quality and just keep paying the bills. For some it will be poor most of the time.
If they don’t like it, they will leave.
This works for these providers because as long as they keep growing their
recurring revenue, a high churn rate is acceptable. And because they exist out in
a cloud somewhere with no direct relationships with their customers or any specific
community, they can acquire customers anywhere and not have to worry too much
about developing a bad reputation.
Even for those providers that do address QoS on their Hosted VoIP service, there is
still the overall question of service and support, something we hear about all the time.
Unlike basic server applications like email or data storage, or familiar applications like
MS Office, Unified Communications is an end-user application that should include user
support. However, many cloud VoIP providers sell their service without ever visiting a
customer. They coordinate the delivery of their services from a remote location over
a transport service that they don’t have direct management or control of. There is little
to no training, no one on site to work through problems unless it’s a contractor that
doesn’t work for the company. And they usually don’t have the ability to fully address
infrastructure issues like wiring or Ethernet switching. Many of these service providers
come from a “utility” background—their traditional business was strictly bandwidth
and dial tone and now they’re trying to deliver end user applications. When you have
a problem you call an 800 number and speak with someone who can tell you that
their service is working just fine, but can’t diagnose or resolve an issue beyond their
limited scope.
6
Clouds, VoIP and Unified Communications
Over the past 10 years,
business VoIP applications
have evolved into what
has been classified as
Unified Communications.
From a strictly financial standpoint, this works for the owners and investors of the
service provider, but not for their customers. It’s the same model that the carrier world
has followed over the past 20 years: build a customer base as fast as possible by selling
cheap—not worrying about service—and then sell or merge revenue streams with
another similar organization to become larger and achieve some economies of scale.
Very simply, it’s not about quality or value for the customer. It’s only about achieving
the financial results for the investors.
Unified Communications (UC) and Unified Communications
as a Service (UCaaS)
Over the past 10 years, business VoIP applications have evolved into what has been
classified as Unified Communications. Although there is no one definition of UC,
there are some standard elements and some combination of these elements would
constitute a UC solution. These elements are:
all Control—the ability to manage calls from a computer-based Graphical User
C
Interface (GUI).
Presence—the ability to see in real time the status and availability of individuals
in your network.
Instant Messaging (IM)—the ability to chat with others inside and/or outside
of your organization.
Unified Messaging—the integration of messaging – voice, email and/or fax—
in a single user interface.
Conferencing—the ability to easily establish voice and web multi-user calls,
either scheduled or instantaneously.
Mobility—the ability to extend UC applications to mobile devices, so users can
be connected wherever they are.
Business Process Integration—the ability to integrate communications abilities
into business procedures, applications and technologies.
These UC solutions have become pervasive and of course, are now offered in the cloud
as a hosted subscription service with its own new terminology and acronym: Unified
Communications as a Service or UCaaS. And, like all hosted services, there are many
different variations and interpretations of UC, and a wide range of providers all claiming
to have the best and to be the best.
UCaaS increases the need to understand network management and good QoS. Not
only do you have phone calls connecting to a remote server, you now have phones,
computers and mobile devices all connecting to remote servers.
7
Clouds, VoIP and Unified Communications
Summary
As with all technology
decisions, the cloud is not
about the hype and glossy
shine, it is about who and
what is behind the services
that you are considering.
So what does it all mean and how do you make decisions for your organizations.
Here’s a couple of key takeaways:
1.
There are many different types of clouds, many applications,
and many different types of service providers.
2. The cloud model has many advantages and some disadvantages—
but it is definitely here to stay.
3. Cloud Hosted VoIP/UCaaS is growing rapidly.
4. If you want a good quality VoIP experience, you must pay attention to QoS.
5. T
here are many new cloud providers that are more focused on financial
results as opposed to Customer Satisfaction.
The cloud is not one thing. In fact it is not a “thing” at all—it is a technology concept
that takes many different forms and comes in many different sizes and shapes, just
like real clouds. As with all technology decisions, the cloud is not about the hype and
glossy shine, it is about who and what is behind the services that you are considering.
To make the best decisions, it is important that you clearly understand your business
needs and wants and understand, as best as possible, the services that are being
offered to you. And, perhaps most critical of all, you should clearly understand the
background, capabilities and business practices of the service provider that you are
considering to be confident that you are choosing a partner that will best help you
deploy and provide ongoing support for the technology that you are acquiring.
About the Author
Andrew Mehlman is a pioneer in VoIP technology dating back to its inception in the
1990s. In the voice and data communications technology and services industry
since 1984, Andrew has designed and implemented applications ranging from basic
telephone systems to converged Unified Communications and VoIP networks. With a
deep knowledge of public networks – voice and data – as well as software and systems,
To contact the author or
for more information, email
[email protected]
or call 508 853 7120
Andrew is focused on building solutions with the right combination of products and
services for the needs of the organizations that he works with. Andrew is customer
focused with a technical orientation and emphasizes quality and value. He has been
Vice President at Barry Communications since 2007.
About Barry Communications
Barry Communications
146 West Boylston Drive
Worcester, MA 01606
888 853 7120
508 853 7120
www.barrycommunications.com
8
Barry Communications is the complete voice and data technology andservices
provider for small-to-medium businesses. From desktop and mobilecommunications
to internet- and carrier-based telephone service, we’re yoursingle source of voice
communications and information technology products,connectivity, and support,
both within your organization and to the outside world.
© 2015 Barry Communications. All rights reserved.