| Following our observations discussed in last week's newsletter, we decided to validate our premises about the evolution of communications services and applications. Today, we'll start with a discussion Larry recently had with John Doyle, vice-president of business development at CommuniGate Systems.
CommuniGate's goal is to consolidate all IP communications. It is a well-established supplier of IP-centric applications and is focused on creating one address space for users - making the single address for e-mail, instant messaging, VoIP and video calling more productive, portable, and independent of tariffs and tolls associated with closed network topologies.
According to Doyle, the network is evolving to a point where "all IP communications become accessible to multiple media types through one account, providing true portability of an address no matter where you access the Internet." He points out that the Internet's architecture, based largely on using DNS servers is very different from the traditional address architecture telcos are used to engineering.
The CommuniGate philosophy sees e-mail as the core of communications and suggests it can be tightly integrated so users can, for example have IMs that trigger calendar events and calendar events that can trigger phone calls. According to Doyle, "This model is the best way to scale - moving away from the traditional or virtual PBX to a hosted applications environment."
He says, "We see a world where a calendar event will dial the call for us, and ask us to press one to join the conference rather than having to look up a bridge number. We also see speech recognition technology so the calendar can call from the doctor's office, reminding you your child has an appointment in the morning." He contends that these kinds of applications are best taken outside of the PBX and should reside inside the Internet. He contends that this approach is ultimately more scalable than a premise-based IP-PBX or applications server.
To enable the suggested architecture, Doyle said that designers must keep in mind that scalability, security and speed are essential. On the issue of security, Doyle acknowledges that an Internet-based application is not as secure as it would be in a closed network. To solve this problem, CommuniGate recommends using the same kinds of techniques as e-mail systems, such as white lists, black lists, and the filtering to prevent spam or denial-of-service attacks.
Our summary: We have suggested a trend toward the broad acceptance of text-based messaging and the move toward media-neutral communications. It looks like Doyle agrees.
Next time, we'll get a different perspective from an advocate of a premises-based solution targeted at small and midsize businesses. If you'd like to weigh in on this observation, please let us know your thoughts by e-mail and we'll publish your comments.
By Steve Taylor and Larry Hettick, Network World |
