Hot Spot - The Reign of Convergence - Bringing Different Networks, Devices Under One Umbrella

Bringing Different Networks, Devices Under One Umbrella

As the two are talking, they decide they need to share an application as part of their discussion. The remote worker dials into the Internet, indicates that he wishes to share an application with his colleague, and the two soon are working with the same spreadsheet.

The two also could access any message from any platform, listening to e-mail messages on a phone or reading voice mail messages on a web-based application.

These services go beyond the usual definition of unified messaging to a true converged communications platform, one that makes it possible to create, access and share any message across multiple networks. They require systems and intelligent applications that can control multiple networks, fixed or mobile, switched or Internet protocol (IP)-based.

More than just finding the recipient, these systems give the parties involved in the message a choice of media for their communication without discontinuing the call. A call placed from a computer that first reaches a mobile phone may be continued as an Internet text chat if the two parties wish to share computer screens and applications. A reply to an e-mail may make a phone ring to establish a voice call.

These converged communications services are shaping up to be the hot application story of 1999, as the leading telecommunications vendors are gearing up to introduce large-scale systems for carriers and enterprises that will enable these kinds of services.

Lucent Technologies Inc., Murray Hill, N.J., announced March 31 a new intelligent network (IN) platform, based on its PacketStar IP Services Platform, that spans IP and switched network systems to allow creation of services that reach from one type of network to the other. From the telephony side, a new product, TelePortal, will allow service providers to offer messaging services that retrieve web-based content via phone, and gain access to IP network services from phones or computers.

On the IP side, it will give IP networks the ability to offer solutions now available on voice networks, such as speech recognition. For business customers, a product called Internet Call Control Management can allow a browser (linked to a directory server) to screen and redirect phone calls, log calls and to make or return calls by clicking on a name or an icon. For both IP and voice networks, a product called NextGen NetPortal authenticates callers and logs them onto IP networks, no matter what phone or computer they are using, and no matter what location.

Just two weeks earlier Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), Palo Alto, Calif.; Intel Corp., Santa Clara, Calif.; Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash.; and Nortel Networks, Richardson, Texas, had signaled the importance of this new kind of communication service when they teamed "to integrate voice technology into computing solutions for open, unified communications."

They announced a broad plan to combine technologies--Intel processors, the Microsoft Windows NT operating system, HP server technology and Nortel telephone processing technologies--to create a platform for computer-based telephony applications. The first applications announced, developed by Nortel and HP, were a Windows NT-based multipurpose business communications server and an advanced unified messaging system.

The communications server is Nortel's most explicit commitment yet to a server-based product and incorporates many of the company's call-processing features, including IP telephony.

The business messaging server incorporates Nortel's CallPilot advanced messaging product, which was released in March. CallPilot uses the voice profile for Internet mail (VPIM) standard, originally developed to exchange voice messages between voice mail systems. CallPilot can be configured to translate a phone number into an IP address and packetize the voice as IP packets, so the message can be delivered like any other e-mail.

"The fact that Nortel licensed CallPilot to HP--a product for unified messaging and voice mail--that was the meat of the announcement," says Brian Strachman, industry analyst of Cahners In-Stat Group, Newton, Mass. "It laid out a path toward how communications will work in the office. Today's separate e-mail server, or voice mail server will eventually just be a communications server, one machine that takes care of e-mail, voice mail and merges the two in what is called unified messaging."

The discussion also emphasized the group's intention to make any products that would result from its collaboration highly reliable, mindful of the "five nines" (or 99.999 percent) reliability that is expected from public telephone systems. John Roth, CEO of Nortel Networks, says the initial business communications server will be developed so the system can be rebooted without affecting the telephony service.

Ericsson Inc., Richardson, Texas, already has announced cooperation with Woodbury, N.Y.-based Comverse Network Systems Inc. on that company's Unified Messaging Platform, which will incorporate the enabling technology of Ericsson's WAP (wireless application protocol) Gateway. The intent is to develop and launch unified messaging services based on the WAP standard, a new global standard for bringing Internet content and advanced services to cellular phones and other wireless terminals.

Later this year, wireless network operators now using Ericsson's WAP Gateway will be able to offer next-generation enhancements, such as Internet access, based on Comverse's existing Unified Messaging Platform and Mobile Visual Mailbox capabilities.

What these announcements have in common, Strachman says, is that they are based on communication servers.

"All those things are doable if it is all on communication servers," he says. "In situations where you are moving messages across media, such as having e-mail read by voice, or seeing a voice message on a computer, anywhere media are switched it is easier if done on one machine."

The use of Windows NT has been both an attraction and a concern. A well-known platform such as NT means that there are thousands of developers who potentially could create applications for converged messaging. At the same time, there is concern about Windows NT's reliability, which in no way approaches the five-nines reliability required of carrier-class telephony. Also of concern is its scalability beyond the small-to-medium business marketplace.

Denver-based US WEST Inc. announced one of the first U.S. launches of a converged messaging service March 11, called US WEST.mail. At the time of launch, US WEST had implemented a web-based, password-protected e-mail service that lets users send and receive e-mail from any computer with Internet access worldwide, using a single e-mail box.

Eventually the service will include:

• The ability to send and receive encrypted e-mail from anywhere in the world;
• The ability to forward and receive messages from US WEST Advanced PCS (personal communications services) wireless phones;
• Address book and calendar features that also can be accessed from any Internet-connected computer or a PCS phone; and
• An integrated messaging service that ultimately will let customers hear their e-mail and read their voice mail.

Despite their usefulness for high-pressure business communications, Strachman sees the overall growth of these kinds of applications as slow.

"Telecom is traditionally very slow," he says. "People don't want to give up PBXs (private branch exchanges) because they work."

Also, the prospect of myriad messaging options has been met with only cautious acceptance by the community that is expected to implement and sell these solutions to business and consumer customers: competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs), Internet service providers (ISPs) and telephony resellers. Their greatest concern: developing expensive services that fail because they bombard potential users with too many choices.

Those who have been the early adopters in offering such services point to the unused-feature syndrome in computer software. For example, an e-mail program always will include the abilities to reply to and forward mail, and also may have the ability to create group lists, to sort mail into mailboxes, to filter messages to eliminate unwanted e-mail, to prioritize mail in importance and to link to an existing address book program. Most users first will employ just one or two of those features and will take months to years to begin to use the others.

Much depends on the acceptance level of customers, says Cindy Adams, director, marketing and product management for MediaGate Inc., San Jose, Calif., which makes a non-real-time unified messaging platform, but intends to move into real-time "instant" messaging applications.

"One of our customers, a next-generation service provider offering debit/credit card telephony and fax, wanted a standards-based IP system with universal messaging because they felt such messaging would be as ubiquitous as e-mail in the future," she says. "But they find it is overwhelming to customers, so they want to roll it out carefully, with one or two subsets or flavors of the whole service."

Typical user scenarios, she says, would be a subscriber who likes e-mail and wants all messages brought into e-mail, or a mobile worker who would want several services simultaneously--mobile telephony, web access and e-mail--and access on the telephone with an 800 number.

"Most subscribers do not want it all," Adams says. "They find one or two things that make life easier."

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