Digital Convergence: All Together
Now
(12/22/00, 12:29 p.m. ET) By Andy Covell, Network Computing
Digital convergence is reshaping the way individuals and
companies collaborate and share information.
Audio, video, animation, and other kinds of rich media
enhance digital communications and kick start new
forms of human interaction.
Digital convergence is the merging of digital
communications technology, computing, and digital
media.
In the first phase of this phenomenon, which we call
Internet computing, the Internet has taken center stage
in a new world of global interaction and information
sharing, with an emphasis on the narrowband exchange
of text, numbers, and images.
The Web, e-mail, and databases are the foundation
technologies of this phase of digital convergence.
Now comes the next phase: rich media, which
incorporates broadband interactive multimedia as a
fundamental feature.
In this phase, sound and video join the Internet party.
Your IT infrastructure, support services, and
applications mix ultimately must empower the people
inside and outside your company.
Widespread use of digital audio and video multimedia
will increase the demand for network bandwidth
considerably.
Real-time interactive applications require a combination
of low latency and uninterrupted transmission.
Applications such as IP telephony, streaming media,
unified messaging, Internet videoconferencing, and
real-time whiteboards and application-sharing won't
work without an infrastructure that includes
policy-based networking with traffic management and
greater amounts of bandwidth.
The rich-media phase makes earlier forms of
networking, such as shared Ethernet connections and
some router deployment, look about as sophisticated as
a child's cups-and-string telephone.
Getting to this point demands difficult technical and
budgetary decisions that determine when, where, and
how your network will enable convergence.
You'll have to determine the parameters for
over-provisioning various aspects of your network, as
well as when to pursue effective bandwidth
management.
You'll need to find mechanisms for equipping mobile
users and telecommuters with rich-media
digital-convergence technologies.
You'll also need to get up to speed on multicasting,
which enables one-to-many streaming, to determine
how it can work for your applications.
And you'll have to stay on top of quality-of-service,
caching schemes, and other technologies being
implemented by service providers across the public
Internet.
It makes sense to give priority to enterprise resource
planning and other transaction-processing systems, and
pass the leftover bandwidth to rich media.
Still, you'll need to understand rich-media technologies'
big-picture benefits, even though they don't immediately
affect the bottom line. They may be more important
than what you see at first blush.
Take streaming media. Some IT managers view this as
a toy technology used primarily for desktop Internet
radio.
True, there are those who will use it mostly for that.
But while users may become comfortable with this
technology listening to their favorite music, the value of
new e-learning content and services that integrate
streaming audio and video could greatly improve
employee and enterprise performance over the long
haul.
There are numerous viable and valuable applications,
and there are several enterprise digital-convergence
applications and technologies you may want or need to
deploy.
Voice over IP is an emerging technology that promises
significant cost savings for your company. By moving
voice and data across a single infrastructure, you
eliminate the need for dual service and support.
IP-telephony technologies and applications run the
gamut from PC-based Internet phone services to
enterprise technology, which offers Ethernet phone
handsets, IP-enabled PBX systems, IP-telephony
servers, and public switched telephone network
gateways.
For companies that have geographically dispersed
offices, voice over IP offers a mechanism for bypassing
the public switched telephone network.
In more ambitious companies, a move to IP-enabled
PBX can allow IP-telephony access via analog
handsets.
Large companies can do this with an upgrade to the
PBX, while smaller companies are often better off
acquiring a pure-IP PBX.
Another alternative is to replace your telephony
infrastructure with an IP-telephony server and Ethernet
handsets, but this isn't for the faint of heart.
The prudent path is to consider one or more
incremental steps, such as a long-distance toll bypass or
a PBX upgrade, and then wait for the technology to
mature.
Enterprise IP telephony is one application that makes
sense to implement and support in-house.
For many other digital-convergence technologies and
apps, outsourcing will be an option you'll want to
consider. New call-center technology is a good
example.
Call-center technology was not too long ago the domain
of the telecommunications manager in most companies.
With the advent of computer-telephony integration, the
call-center function began to merge into IT.
Now, in many companies, the IT department has
assumed full responsibility for telecommunications
management, and it must oversee call-center operations
and integrate call-center functions as part of a CRM
strategy
Interactive Multimedia
Digital Convergence: The Next Phase
Approaches
continued...page 2 of 2
By Andy Covell, reprinted from network computing
With the Web and E-mail now widely used, and as
various rich-media communication options gain
momentum, customer expectations for service or sales
interactions that incorporate E-mail, chat, and voice
over IP are rapidly evolving. There's also the nagging
difficulty of finding customer-service employees to staff
the call center. New call-center technology can handle
multiple media while creating a virtual call center that
ties together telecommuting service representatives.
Companies that don't establish an effective CRM
strategy incorporating solid call-center technology will
soon find themselves at a severe competitive
disadvantage.
Converged call-center server systems are expensive,
and the expertise for implementing and managing a
digital call center is scarce. Many IT managers are
running themselves ragged just trying to stay on top of
basic network file and application services; getting staff
up to speed on call-center hardware, software, and integration issues may be
out of the question.
Fortunately, outsourcing options are increasing, including telco providers,
call-center operators who provide call-center seats, and call-center
consultants. The application-service-provider model figures to be big in this
space, as CRM players such as Oracle and Siebel Systems Inc. roll out ASP
versions of their products, while smaller outfits such as Synchrony Inc. offer
ASP-based outsourcing that bundles the telephony piece with thin-client
access to customer histories housed in remote ASP databases.
Streaming media is poised to become a prominent digital-convergence
technology with near-VHS video quality now possible via products from
Apple Computer, Microsoft, and RealNetworks. Streaming media is also a
great fit for packet-switched networks, since the buffered play masks
network latency and jitter delay.
Streaming-media applications vary considerably, complicating the process of
identifying them and developing an enterprise strategy. For example,
streaming media can be live or on demand. It can take the form of video
contained within an E-mail message, or it can appear as a stream of
synchronized video, text, and PowerPoint slides embedded in a Web page.
Applications can vary from in-house training to external customer service,
security monitoring, or advertising. Video content can be high-quality media
geared toward top-level corporate decision-makers or raw black-and-white
real-time streams that monitor lab facilities. The nature of the applications you
envision will determine your streaming-media deployment strategy.
Here, too, you'll face the outsourcing decision. On-demand intranet streaming
is fairly easy to implement, but even then you may not have the in-house
media production expertise to deliver quality material.
You may want to do a live Webcast when you expect a large Internet
viewership, pushing you toward an outsourced arrangement with vendors
such as Akamai or Digital Island Inc. Or, if you're in a small company with
limited streaming-media technical expertise and dollars, you may need to
keep it simple and inexpensive. And you may be able to find a small studio
with the appropriate streaming facilities and expertise to handle your
application at a reasonable cost.
Perhaps you want to focus on a specific application, such as E-learning, in
which case you could outsource to an ASP. Or you could secure the services
of a Web-development outfit that can integrate streaming media with your
public Internet presence. The outsourcing options are wide-ranging, as are
emerging streaming-media applications.
Internet videoconferencing is a digital-convergence technology that looks
promising but has some serious hurdles to overcome before becoming a
mainstream business application. Although the technology has been around
for many years, it's never caught on among business users, primarily because
of the difficulties of ensuring reasonable-quality interactive video over the
public Internet or across stressed WAN connections.
While your enterprise LAN can support quality conferencing, this technology
is all about overcoming distance barriers. The farther apart participants are,
the more likely it is that they'll use the public Internet or a corporate WAN
connection where latency and traffic congestion occur. Thus, this technology
remains the domain of hobbyists, college students, and pornographers.
Internet quality-of-service mechanisms must be in place and bandwidth less
costly before Internet videoconferencing is a factor in the enterprise.
While you may choose not to implement Internet videoconferencing across
the company anytime soon, you'll undoubtedly have users who regularly use
Microsoft NetMeeting and other similar conferencing tools independent of
you and your company. This exemplifies a trend that will see an increasing
number of users flocking to rich-media digital-convergence applications with
or without your help.
Digital-convergence technologies and applications allow new forms of human
communication, interaction, and collaboration. Individuals and workgroups
can often implement these capabilities easily: Download a streaming player.
Fire up NetMeeting. Install a free 20-stream RealServer. Use Dialpad to call
long distance at no charge. This sort of behavior has already been happening
in companies to some degree.
Consumer broadband creates an empowering user experience, further
stimulating this trend. Wireless, rich-media-enabled portable devices, such as
personal digital assistants and Web phones, will also empower mobile users
with new resources and types of interaction. Add to this an increasingly
technology-savvy workforce, and you'll have a tough time explaining why the
firewall cuts RealPlayer off at the knees when viewing an external Webcast
on the corporate desktop.
Despite--or, more likely, because of--users' enthusiastic adoption of these
technologies, IT must handle the important job of deploying, standardizing,
and supporting strategic digital-convergence technologies. You'll need to
make a proactive effort to survey the applications of new technology that
bubble up and out from the trenches rather than emanating from the central IT
core. Create a partnership with your users and support the business
applications they explore and gravitate toward. |
