Bridging the User Expectation Gap in Enterprise UC

Business communications applications, like Microsoft Lync, are rapidly being deployed to give users a rich communications and collaboration experience across their multiple devices and networks. To ensure seamless connectivity, investments are being made in Wireless LAN to upgrade to the latest and greatest technology.

What remains missing for most users is a true end-to-end Quality of Experience for this new breed of communications and collaboration services within and across the campus. In fact, most enterprise users have begun to expect inconsistent and broken experiences with real time collaboration, especially video, where an occasional poor video or voice experience is considered "par for the course."

Meanwhile, the true value (increased productivity, new GTM routes, cost savings etc,) and consequently the ROI of unified communications and collaboration is diminished as a result, with employees less likely to use and fully exploit the power of the tools they are given.

IT vendors have been listening and today a host of new technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN), next-gen WLAN solutions, and industry standards are being developed and implemented to dramatically enhance the user experience for organizations and campus-based real time communications.

Technologies like 802.11ac, with its higher performance, longer range, and MIMO antennas, are fundamental for increasing air interface capacity and network speeds. New Qualification programs from Microsoft for Lync, for example, give customers the confidence that an 802.11 solution has been tested and qualified in a real world, challenging environment and that it will work well with Lync and real time communications in general.

Adding to these developments, new protocols like OpenFlow have become mainstream - for example HP has shipped over 50 OpenFlow enabled switches, and over 30 million ports over the past two years. OpenFlow is considered the first SDN standard, one of its use-cases is to enable remote controllers to determine the path of network packets through the network of switches, allowing switches from different vendors - often each with their own proprietary interfaces and scripting languages - to be managed remotely using a single, open protocol.

This resulting vision of SDN is now reality, with early deployments underway today.

Having said that, many organizations are struggling with the perceived benefits versus the reality of changing their existing network architecture. While the benefits are clear in terms of innovation and flexibility, the challenge is, "How do I get there from here? How do I alter my network infrastructure to realize those benefits at a pace and a budget that I can afford?"

One approach is a hybrid model that encompasses SDN-enabled infrastructure and non SDN-enabled infrastructure. With this approach, specific functions can be assigned to SDN-enabled switches, with organizations enabling more functionality over time. It's hybrid in both that it works with legacy infrastructure and legacy protocols, which is critical for allowing customers a smooth transition from where they are today to where they want to be in the future.

To facilitate SDN evolution, leaders in the SDN arena have started developing SDN "Apps" for number of use cases such as optimization, orchestration, security etc. Those "Apps" are now available from companies like HP, who recently launched the first SDN App Store, and others. It's through these "Apps" written to SDN APIs that rich application visibility to the network infrastructure can be enabled for empowering quality voice, video and sharing to Lync softphone devices. In addition, the same API on the SDN controller means that developers can integrate network status information into the application, and vice versa, in order to dynamically steer traffic for better performance.

As an example, Microsoft released an open SDN API to improve Lync performance last year, enabling companies like HP to integrate information from the Lync API into their own systems. The power of SDN means opening up the networking to new capabilities delivered by an entire ecosystem of companies.