UCI Forum and Open Networking Foundation Announce Collaborative Relationship

The Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCI Forum), announced today that it has signed an agreement with the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), to accelerate the adoption of open Software-Defined Networking (SDN) in UC. The agreement establishes a collaborative relationship in the area of SDN integration in unified communications environments. This is an important step in coordinating how UC platforms will interface with SDN-based network services ensuring a better UC user experience.

The Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCI Forum) is a non-profit alliance of communications technology leaders that is working to realize the potential of unified communications (UC) by improving the interoperability among UC platforms. The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is a non-profit organization whose mission is to accelerate the adoption of open SDN through the promotion of open SDN and OpenFlow technologies and standards.

The two organizations are working on three areas of mutual interest for their collaborative efforts:

• Research and publish use cases that leverage SDN architectures and protocols to enable or enhance UC
  
  
• Demonstrate the effective deployment of UC solutions that are supported by SDN architectures
  
  
• Identify a basic framework for a common northbound interface allowing networking elements to communicate with UC applications

To this end, the UCI Forum will define a UC-SDN framework and API that will drive the interaction between UC and the various SDN functions. That initiative will build on similar frameworks that are being proposed by other SDN communities. As ONF is developing their framework for Northbound APIs to SDN controllers, the UCI Forum will work with ONF to leverage its development efforts.

This collaboration shows an expansion of focus in the UCI Forum. Initially conceived as an organization to foster interoperability among UC vendors, the membership is now expanding to include network infrastructure vendors like HP and WLAN maker Aruba Networks. As UC networks are more widely deployed, the challenges involved in interfacing with those network infrastructures are becoming more apparent.

One of the core ideas in UC is the ability for users to access any of their available communication (voice, video, text, or email) and collaboration (audio/video/web conferencing or screen sharing) tools through a single dashboard. From a network standpoint the challenge is that those different communications sessions require different types of services from the network. To deliver a high quality user experience, voice and video sessions require low latency, low loss and minimal jitter, while email or text can get by with basic data transport services. Those more demanding voice and video sessions become even more challenging in a multi-party conferencing scenario.

The idea behind this initiative is to allow UC platforms to talk to the SDN-based network infrastructure and define the parameters for the network services they will require for each type of session. Today networking groups must configure sufficient transport services of each type, typically in an MPLS backbone, and then ensure that packets for each session are tagged correctly so that they receive the required treatment across the network. An intelligent interface between the UC platform and the underlying network eliminates that need to preconfigure the transport, and simplifies the interface between the application and the network service.

The idea behind this initiative is not entirely new. In April of this year, HP and Microsoft demonstrated a proof of concept at the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara provisioning a Lync session through an HP SDN controller and switches. In the demonstration Lync used an API to signal the UC&C Application on the controller the requirements for the session, which it then used to automatically provision the switches for QoS and security.

As a follow on to that proof of concept, the UCI Forum participated in the Next Generation Networking and Software Defined Networking (SDN) Workshop at Interop 2013 in New York discussing the use of SDN technology in a UC environment.

While hammering out the interface between the UC platform and the network is an important initiative, the UCI Forum still faces the much larger challenge of involving the entire UC industry. A review of the UCI Forum membership shows that it is still comprised largely of vendors who are part of the Microsoft Lync ecosystem. Notably absent from the roster are Cisco, Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent, NEC, Unify, and Mitel. The only IP PBX manufacturer listed on the UCI Forum site is ShoreTel.

Among those IP PBX vendors, Cisco, Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent, and NEC all manufacture networking equipment, and all but Avaya are members of the ONF. So the question becomes will all of the ONF members adopt these new interfaces, or will we see a scenario where Cisco ties its UC Manager to its SDN platform, Alcatel-Lucent to its SDN platform, and we wind up with even less cross-vendor interoperability than we have today.

The reality is that no one vendor will completely dominate the UC space, and with the growing need for inter-company UC interoperability, mechanisms for getting the various platforms to work together will be an imperative. What we are now seeing is the growing appreciation that "interoperability" involves not just the UC platform and things like video endpoints, but the network elements that will tie it all together.

The UCI Forum has made an important step of linking the UC platform to the network, but the much bigger and more important challenge will be to bring all of the various elements of the UC community under the same tent. Hopefully this agreement with the ONF will be a step in that direction.