Changing the network's core

Communications News, April, 1998 by Ripley Hotch

"Desktop convergence may not be the first step, but it is a step," he says. "The gateway technology that you're getting yourself comfortable with is really the starting point, not the ultimate end-all be-all. It is the ability to take your telephone with you wherever you go, as opposed to having it forwarded nine or ten times--to actually have a physical device that wherever you go, whatever office you sit down in, people can call the same number and actually get you. Or you can plug your phone and your computer in any outlet in any of your facilities and notification of all your voice mail shows up."

Although the attraction of telephony over data networks to most organizations is the money saved in bypassing the LEC and IXC, Veschi says, the benefits of combining the infrastructures goes far beyond that.

"Just consolidating the management gets rid of the administration nightmare of trying to maintain two or three separate infrastructures," he says. "Now people are deciding to put a third infrastructure in for video because they don't want to impact the LAN that they have today."

Veschi is not an advocate of video as it exists today, although he thinks it will come of age in two or three years. But for network managers, he says, the important thing is "there's going to come a day no matter what they do, whether it's voice or video or data, there are applications out there that are going to require them to re-engineer their networks. So if they're going to re-engineer their network for any application, why not re-engineer it for the application that costs the organization the most on the bottom line, which is telecommunications?"

The money is there to do it, he says, in just the amount that is budgeted for current telecommunications solutions. "This is an opportunity for us as network managers to finally become a profit center. Say: `We'll give you a robust architecture, we'll give you excellent management, and we'll return dollars to your bottom line. What we ask in return is give us two-thirds of this pot of money over here to do it.' "

TACTICAL COMMUNICATIONS

Veschi's experience with the government market makes him sensitive to the issue of tactical communications, which is an industrial as well as a government requirement.

"Tactical communications is a key market for convergence," he says. Large corporations in international markets are often in buildings they don't own, and have to shift their communications quickly. They also cannot be sure of security in the telephone network--especially as most governments are not willing to allow strong encryption in any public network.

"But when you look at it," Veschi says, "these guys already have corporate data infrastructure into all of these countries that is privatized. The thing that is not privatized is telecommunications. So if you can offer them a technology that affords them the luxury of turning the audio into a data application using the same encryption technology that they use to encrypt the CAD/CAM files between each of the facilities, and if you can allow them to set up communications where they walk in and plug into an RJ45 in any building and have the same telephone number wherever they go, you've solved a major problem."