IP Telephony: Ring in the Benefits

With the world becoming flat, communication costs are on the

rise. Enterprises are now spread all over the world, even in very remote

corners, and with the ever-increasing need for constant communication, they are

facing soaring communication costs.

IP telephony or whatever name you call it by (Voice over IP or

VoIP)/Internet telephony, Broadband telephony, Broadband Phone) has become an

affordable alternative for enterprises to keep in touch internally as well as

externally.

According to a Gartner survey, voice and data convergence based

on IP telephony and VoIP will be under way in more than 95% of major enterprises

by 2010. Convergence will drive additional classes of communications-enabled

business applications and cause an upheaval in the telecommunications industry.

The report states that by 2010, 40% of enterprises will have completed the

convergence of all their voice and data networks on to a single network, and

more than 95% of large and midsize enterprises will have started the process. So

what is IP telephony? Wikipedia defines it as the routing of voice conversations

over the Internet or through any other IP-based network.

Why IP?



Indian enterprises are cost conscious and are always looking at finding ways
to better leverage their existing infrastructure investment. Reduction in

communication cost is one major benefit of implementing IP telephony. The

savings come due to the use of a single network to carry both voice and data and

become more pronounced when users have existing under-utilized network capacity,

which they can use for IP telephony without incurring additional costs.

It's not just about cutting costs but also increased

functionality. Mobility is also enhanced with the use of IP telephony as users

can route incoming calls to their VoIP phone whenever they are connected to the

network irrespective of where they are. Also, for India, a major use of IP

telephony is in the call centers. The call center agents can work from anywhere

if they have a fast and secure Internet connection.

According to IDC, IP Telephony is advocated mainly because it

allows new applications to be integrated on the legacy system of the client,

which are otherwise very difficult to implement using traditional telephony at

reasonable cost. VoIP is one such application, which makes it possible to have

an office phone at home with a VPN.

Businesses are looking at VoIP to simplify their networks and

reduce cost of call and operational costs. Moving forward, IP-based solutions

will enable enterprises to deploy different services, which the operators will

be forced to offer in order to beat competition.

"The idea of location-independent services in the network means that an enterprise can use a building-block approach for migrating its communications to IP on a site-by-site, group-by-group, or application-by-application basis" -Ranajoy Punja, VP, Advanced Technology, Cisco Systems

Enterprise Implementation



Enterprises in India are now looking beyond using IP telephony only for
voice calls and are looking at integrating video using video phones in IP

telephony. Birlasoft is one such company. The company has around 450 ports

deployed for IP telephony and has invested around $3,00,000 for implementation.

Says Pushpendu Roy, head, IT, Birlasoft, "We are using IP telephony in

optimizing our existing infrastructure and communication cost in leveraging

convergence technology. Having already implemented IP telephony in our

organization, the next step for us would be to implement Unified Messaging

whereby the voice mails stored on telephone instruments can be made available to

users as e-mails with voice messages as attachments. There are also options to

integrate Video using Video Phones in IP Telephony."

IPT is going to be an integral part in the future roadmap of

Aztecsoft. The company plans to connect all its offices in India as well as

worldwide with IPT. Currently, the company is in the process of implementing

around 250-300 ports as a prototype. Based on the performance and value creation

it plans to further up this number.

Lapp India is also planning to implement it but its GM, IT,

Venugopal C feels that the kind of service provided in India is definitely not

up to the mark: "There is lot of packets loss, which hamper IP telephony in

a major way. Packets loss is a major area, which service providers need to look

into."

Key Verticals



IT and ITeS is one vertical, which started with a bang and is one of IP
telephony's largest vertical segment; next comes BFSI.

As Dinesh Sehgal of Avaya says, "When IP telephony started

four-five years back, the call center industry was being set up, growing mainly

due to the cost arbitrage advantage. It made a lot of sense for people setting

up call centers to deploy IP on their backbone. With more applications being

added, IP telephony is now cutting across all verticals-education,

manufacturing, etc.

"For Cisco, within the enterprise segment, banking and

financial is one of the most important verticals," says Ranajoy Punja, VP,

Advanced Technology, Cisco Systems, adding, "Other important emerging

verticals for Cisco in India include manufacturing, retail, media and

entertainment, healthcare and pharma. These verticals are increasing their IT

spend to achieve competitive differentiation and building global

capabilities."

D-Link is another company, which is pinning its hope on VoIP.

KVSSS. Gunneswara Rao, director, D-Link India says, "One may see VoIP

technology as part of the BPO, ITeS, Service Provider (bulk back haul), and IP

Telephony segments, but VoIP is also dominating in government as well as the

large enterprise space. In all segments together VoIP technology may be giving

an additional yearly turnover of about Rs 1,000 crore, to IT and

telecommunications which is growing."

Is Security a Deterrent?



Since IP telephony uses the existing IP network as its foundation, attacks
on this data network can also adversely affect voice services. One of the most

common threats is a denial-of-service attack, which shuts down an application or

server. These attacks are often made against routers, Web servers and mail

servers-but they can also target call-processing servers in IP telephony

networks.

According to Cisco, security is not a deterrent to adoption of

IP telephony. However, one needs to adopt a holistic approach and network

security concerns need to be considered as IP Telephony can introduce

unauthorized entry points into the network. For this it is imperative that

converged networks enable converged security, which extends beyond traditional

data security policies that address privacy of all the different elements

comprising a network, including the IP Telephony traffic. So the IT architecture

has to design IT security policies for voice and data without affecting the

performance of mission critical applications.

VoIP utilization involving soft phones and software are

vulnerable to worms, viruses and malware. Since these softphone applications run

on user systems like PCs and PDAs, they are exposed and vulnerable to malicious

code attacks in voice applications. Call tampering is also emerging as a threat.

According to Avaya, security is a valid concern because anyone

can spoof into the IP network and get to hear the confidential conversation

going on. Dinesh Sehgal of Avaya said, "Here (security) the role of vendors

like us comes in as we ensure that all the discussions are confidential. We

offer security inbuilt into the phones itself-we offer encryption on all our

models of IP phones."

"We are using IP telephony in optimizing our existing infrastructure and communication cost in leveraging convergence technology" Pushpendu Roy, head, IT, Birlasoft

According to Nortel, security is one of the biggest concerns in

IP telephony deployment. Says Sajan Paul head, Technology & Consulting,

Enterprise Solutions, Nortel India, "However, there are newer protocols

like Secure RTP (sRTP), signaling encryption and voice firewalls to take care of

these issues. Unlike traditional TDM deployment , IP telephony needs a thorough

network planning and disaster recovery design."

Integration Challenges



IP gives the flexibility to an organization to choose its own pace to
migrate and integrate IP Telephony with legacy systems. By integrating with most

major legacy PBXs and voice-mail systems, as well as mission-critical business

applications, most leading IP players empower customers to migrate based on

their business needs instead of technology limitations.

Punja says, "Additionally, the idea of location-independent

services in the network means that an enterprise can use a building-block

approach for migrating its communications to IP on a site-by-site,

group-by-group, or application-by-application basis. In fact, 99% of Cisco's

customers migrate their networks to IP Communications using this approach."

Successful customer migration to IP communications is as much

about process as it is about technology. Understanding this, leading industry

players have developed detailed plans and processes that make migration

smoother, faster, and easier for enterprises of all sizes.

To implement IP telephony the following checks on the existing

network may be considered: electronic check and analysis of the total existing

network for QoS; bandwidth estimation, as enterprises are increasing the load on

the network with voice in addition to data; knowledge of the voice and data

standards and protocols (implementation support); survey of wireless LAN, if

there's wireless network; network redundancy, as voice network should not

fail.

IP telephony is struggling to establish a foothold in the market since uptake of pure IP solutions is predominantly in greenfield opportunities. The exorbitantly high prices of IP phones is one of the major challenge that continues to hamper the growth of this market. Voice is carried over the network, which is shared by various applications. This causes time lag or poor voice quality at the receiver's end. Source: IDC

Hurdles in the Way



Till recently, a single infrastructure was not allowed in India. However,
with TRAI notifying approval for "logical partitioning" of public

switched telephone network (PSTN) and closed user group (CUG) networks,

enterprises, service providers, application software developers as well as

Internet telephony vendors have a lot of reason to rejoice. Corporate users now

can slash down the investment that goes into setting up networks as they would

not have to manage the expense of two separate PSTN and CUG networks.

According to Punja of Cisco, "Interoperability is a major

concern due to lack of standardization. However, with the adoption of standard

protocol such as "SIP" in the call control engine, organizations can

integrate their legacy or hybrid systems with Cisco IPT solutions thereby

preserving their investment. However, full convergence would take more time but

will further reduce cost and improve RoI for customers implementing IP

Telephony."

Darryl Green, CEO, Tata Teleservices feels that the IP telephony

market is yet to take off in India due to regulatory restrictions. According to

him, "Domestic IP telephony is currently allowed only on a closed user

group (CUG) setup and telecom operators are not permitted to use their existing

infrastructure to offer IP Telephony services. While a few large enterprises

have adopted IP telephony for their internal communication requirements, the

market is very small. There is, however, huge potential with respect to this

technology platform and it warrants focus from telecom operators and regulatory

bodies."

Service Providers Landscape



With the onset of broadband in India every service provider is planning to
deliver killer applications and content to homes. VoIP is fast becoming the part

of the communications technology that will be playing a significant role in the

IP networks space along with Ethernet.

According to IDC India's Quarterly Enterprise Telephony Equipment (ETE) Tracker, 2006 the Indian ETE market stood at $257.5 mn (for the period January 1, 2006 to September 30, 2006), with 2006 expected to close at $358.5 mn. Forecast for the year 2007 is $419.2 mn. These estimates and forecasts include telephony products like Pure IP PBX, Hybrid IP PBX, PBX KTS, IP Phones & A/D Phones. Source: IDC

Tata Indicom offers a suite of customized solutions under the

'corporate internet telephony' portfolio, allowing customers to connect with

the world using a voice network through the Internet. The company claims that

this technology facilitates clear and smooth voice transmission and gives the

user up to 70% on all international calls.

Reliance is looking at offering IP telephony as a managed

Communication Service. The objective is to provide for a superior user

experience and extend a wide range of content and application services for the

enterprises in addition to traditional voice services. Reliance's IP Telephony

would cater to the requirements of the various user groups within an enterprise.

Some of the services that would be delivered through IPT , which are not

available with traditional telephony solutions include distributed enterprise

networking, content delivery on high end IP phones, video telephony experience,

tele presence, unified communication and high quality voice.

BSNL is currently not providing IP telephony services. MTNL has

already rolled out its IP telephony services and is currently in the process of

registering the user enterprises. Other service providers in the IP telephony

space includes Airtel.

Current Trends



India, considering it is still a market in its infancy as far as IP
telephony is concerned, a market with a lot of potential. Also, India is a

competitive marketplace and the fast-growing stature of the country as an

outsourcing hub-and the resultant boom in the BPO space-means that the

demand in the market is set to soar faster than anywhere else in the world.

	Key Players in the Indian IPT Market
	Avaya Global Connect Siemens Alcatel Cisco Nortel Ericsson

Though regulatory issues remain, it is quality telecom solutions

and services, and operational support at the back-end, which will determine

success or otherwise for enterprises .

According to Reliance, the Indian telephony market is not very

different from its global peers. The company expects enterprises to start

migrating to IPT in the near future. The adoption rate, especially in India, is

expected to be a function of the price. Today, IP PBX vendors largely drive IP

telephony in the enterprise segment and there is a prohibitively high capex

involved in the same. The entry of service provider in this market will make IP

telephony more affordable since the solution will now be available as a service

against a monthly charge. The only possible capex would be that required for IP

phones.

Says Sajan Paul of Nortel, "Indian market is as aggressive

as any other developed market for IP telephony. We have seen IP telephony as the

default choice for any green-field customer. The key features that drive this

trend is the mobility features combined with simplicity of installation,

advanced unified communication features etc." IDC's take: IP telephony is

struggling to establish a foothold in the market since uptake of pure IP

solutions is predominantly in greenfield opportunities. The exorbitantly high

prices of IP phones is one of the major challenge that continues to hamper the

growth of this market. Voice is carried over the network, which is shared by

various applications. This causes time lag or poor voice quality at the receiver's

end.

What's in Store



Going forward, IP telephony is expected to become the foundation to unify
communication applications and assess how business and communication processes

can be changed or integrated with IP telephony and collaborative applications.

Moreover, the success of the SMB market and specific vertical markets (such as

manufacturing, retail, healthcare, etc) will see a stronger success rate of IP

adoption with vendors getting aggressive in these areas.

Pragati Simlote



dqindia@cybermedia.co.in