Koen Verholen & Davor Jakic
In this interview, BT’s Koen Verholen and integrator Davor Jakic talk about IT-telecommunications convergence, from the service and solution viewpoint, emphasizing the three phases of that convergence.
We interviewed Koen (who is Head of the Mobility and Collaboration Practice at BT Professional Services) and Davor (a BT Systems Integrator) on convergence.
We asked them to explain how BT’s virtual data centre offering (On Demand Compute), SIP and Microsoft’s Unified Communication platform Lync make for a powerful combination.
Can you explain why it makes sense to integrate these services? And what role is BT’s Professional Services team playing in this?
Let’s start at the beginning. You could argue that the ongoing convergence between IT and telecommunications went through a number of key phases, certainly from our perspective at BT Professional Services.
In the first phase we helped our clients avoid call charges—especially long-distance call charges—by pushing voice traffic between the company’s offices onto their data network. Compared to analogue telephone systems, Voice over IP obviously has a number of advantages such as portability (you’re calling a person, not a location) and a wider range of features. But the opportunity to reduce call charges, especially long-distance charges, was a key driver for implementing VoIP. The problem was that this only pertained to internal calls between company sites, where the company’s data network could be used. As a result, companies were still stuck with a lot of hardware since each site needed a voice gateway and voice lines to connect to the local PSTN (the public telephone network).
In a second phase we are currently installing SIP breakouts for our clients, connecting their data network direct to the public telephone networks. This means that our clients don’t need to connect to the PSTN themselves at each site; it’s simply part of the network as a managed service. It translates into a major consolidation of one’s PBX infrastructure. Furthermore, since BT has a global MPLS network with SIP breakouts to most public telephone networks around the world we’re now able to help our clients avoid nearly all long-distance call charges. If a user makes a long-distance call to an external number then the call is first routed over the data network to the destination country before being patched to the local PSTN via a local SIP trunk. That makes it a local call.
Enter BT’s virtual data center offering?
Yes. In the third phase it gets really interesting when you add BT’s virtual data centre services and a Unified Communications application like Microsoft Lync to the picture. Lync is Microsoft’s Unified Communication platform that emerged out of its desktop and Office products. It basically places a VoIP client onto your desktop allowing you to initiate calls, chat sessions and videoconferencing from your PC. However, to obtain the full benefit of Lync you need to combine it with SIP so that your entire communications environment can be made digital.
By combining Lync and SIP you’re able to make your entire communications environment digital, doing away with the need for analogue phones. Furthermore, it will allow you to start integrating your business applications—such as CRM—with your communications setup. For example, CRM becomes really efficient if users are able to make calls directly from within the system; and that it logs all communications automatically too. This type of deep integration between CRM, email and voice is much easier to manage if those applications are centrally hosted and managed. An important BT differentiator is that we’re able to manage all this on an end-to-end basis with a single SLA. By centralizing it all we’re able to reduce the total cost of ownership while at the same time keeping a strong grip on security and manageability.
In principle there is no need to deal with separate providers for infrastructure, network and SIP trunk. BT can manage the entire context end-to-end and take full responsibility—on a global basis. That is the key differentiator for us. And Professional Services is the team that helps clients transition to a fully digital environment. We’re the BT system integrator. We help our clients move through the phases we outlined earlier, gradually consolidating their PBX infrastructure and moving toward a fully managed environment.
Resources: BT paper on Virtual Data Centers, cost and efficiency (PDF opens).
Share your thoughts by commenting below or joining the conversation in the BT Let’s Talk LinkedIn Group.
Tags: Davor Jakic, IT-telecommunications, Koen Verholen, Lync, Microsoft, MPLS, On Demand Compute, SIP, telecommunications convergence, Unified Communication, VDC, virtual data center, virtual data centre offering
