Large Enterprise Deployments Full of Challenges
Today’s technologies offer customers a variety of solutions to address their business needs and issues. Whether a customer is looking for a way to make their mobile sales force more productive and hence generate more revenue, or reduce product development time and speed up time to market, there are cost-effective solutions available. But – and it’s a big “but” – most customers have already made a significant investment in their voice and data infrastructure, not to mention the voice systems themselves. The good news is that many of the solutions available today rely on open architecture and industry standards to make them compatible with existing systems and infrastructure.
This compatibility has made it possible for organizations to benefit from various unified communication solutions by overlaying the new technology on the old, thereby still protecting the existing investment. In a recent webinar on migration strategies that I participated in, Gary Mading of Aastra provided some very compelling examples of how using an overlay strategy can be considerably more cost effective and less labor intensive than replacing existing systems and infrastructure to take advantage of the many solutions that fall under the heading of UC.
However, there are still some unique challenges involved in deploying large enterprise solutions, whether those solutions involve unified communications or other technologies. Of course, one widely-accepted practice to prepare for a large-scale deployment is a pilot deployment on a much smaller scale. The pilot can serve multiple purposes:
- Test the solution’s reliability in advance of a full-scale roll-out. This is especially important for solutions that contain a voice element. In most cases, there is a degree of acceptability in data access being down for a limited period, but that is not the case for voice, which is almost always considered “mission critical.”
- Test the planning and implementation steps for effectiveness.
- Test the effectiveness of the solution itself. Does it solve the problem or address the need as expected?
- Gain a group of satisfied users who will champion the solution across a broader implementation.
The pilot, however, is only one element of a large scale deployment and often can address only a few of the challenges that type of deployment presents. According to managers and directors of technology of several very large organizations that I interviewed recently, there are a number of other challenges that enterprises face. For example, Louis Hammond of the University of Minnesota noted that one of the first challenges his university has to address is identifying communication and information systems solutions that can scale to accommodate the university’s 35,000 users, 70,000 network ports and 5,000 WiFi ports. Hammond claims that for the University, scalability is key and too many vendors don’t build for scaling that large. Hammond indicated that often times vendors try to meet the University’s bid specs by “kludging together” products to meet the magic 35,000 number.
John Cavender, Manager of Technical Services at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, described the two primary challenges that he sees when the University is ready to implement unified communication solutions for its 15,000 users. Cavender explained that with multiple sites involved, just getting the network ready for voice will be a considerable challenge. Then there’s the issue of re-educating users for the changes in the ways that they use their communication tools. Bill Phillips, Assistant Director of Campus Technologies at Mansfield University in Pennsylvania, spoke about re-educating users as well. Phillips explained that some of the features the staff is used to and comfortable with don’t currently exist in the IP telephony world. He went on to explain the importance of conditioning the 4,000 users to a new way of doing things; to manage their expectations so that perceived negatives become positives for those users.
Then there is yet another challenge – or series of challenges – for those enterprises with multiple sites. We often see situations where an enterprise grew through acquisitions and the systems at the various locations are disparate and from a variety of vendors. The primary challenge here becomes finding a solution that will work with all of the systems, in order to avoid doing a costly rip and replace of the systems themselves so that all are the same and will work with that solution. The optimum situation would be the “overlay” strategy, mentioned above, that fits over all of the different architectures to create a single solution. This provides several benefits for multi-location situations, such as creating a single, unified dialing plan for all locations.
One of the other challenges involved in enterprise deployments today centers on the convergence of voice and data networks and the integrator responsible for the deployment. Today both data VARs and telecom dealers provide converged and UC solutions to the enterprise, yet their different backgrounds often cause them to look at the deployment differently. For many customers, data access is not considered mission critical. It may be inconvenient for a server or a network to be down for a few hours, but it is not business threatening. On the other hand, it’s unacceptable for the voice network to be down for even a few minutes. Integrators from the data side are now learning what telecom dealers have always known – for an implementation involving voice, such things as redundancy and emergency power backup are very important.
Are these the only challenges an enterprise could face with large-scale deployments of today’s technology? Not by a long shot! But they are certainly some of the most significant.
Where is all of this taking us? It appears that there are at least two very important elements of any successful large enterprise deployment. The first is identifying vendors with solutions that can cleanly scale to the needed parameters. The second is locating an integrator or vendor experienced in designing, implementing and supporting very large systems…an integrator or vendor who understands the challenges and has addressed them successfully in other situations. Speaking with Hammond of the University of Minnesota, Cavender at the University of Massachusetts and Phillips at Mansfield University, and others, it became apparent that Aastra is a good example of one of those integrators or vendors. Aastra claims 30 years of experience with large scale deployments – from its experience in communication network design, implementations managed by PMP-certified project managers, to support provided by its MCSE/CCNA-certified Support Analysts. It would appear that Aastra is a good example of the type of partner an enterprise would seek for their large scale UC or other deployments.
This paper is sponsored by Aastra.