The Challenges of Integrating UC and Video Conferencing

The Challenges of Integrating UC and

Video Conferencing

Today’s business environment demands ever increasing productivity for our information workers. Unified communications pulls together different modes of communications: simplifying collaboration, reducing human latency, and increasing the speed of business. Integrating video conferencing with a UC platform further extends this productive environment by adding the positive values of visual communications to the collaboration experience.

In today’s market, best of breed UC and video conferencing solutions are not available from the same vendor, so integration of these solutions is required. This integration task provides significant challenges to an enterprise IT team in terms of the time needed to design, test, and deploy the integrated solution. In addition, the learning curve for deploying these new technologies can be substantial.

A further challenge is to get the user community to integrate the use of the video conferencing capabilities into their daily work flow, so the value it provides can be realized by the enterprise. Workers grow accustomed to their daily business practices and resist change, unless tools are easy to use and provide clear advantages.

The investment made to integrate video and UC, both in capital costs and time, does not deliver full value to the enterprise until the integration is complete and fully operational, and until the users incorporate this new capability in their daily workflow. Figure 1 below shows graphically that this time, referred to as ‘time-to-value’, includes both deployment time and user uptake time.

Reducing time-to-value will increase the return on investment (ROI) for the company by enabling user productivity sooner. It is possible to reduce both the deployment time and user uptake time by applying the right experience and expertise.

Polycom Professional Services has the experience and skills to help reduce both components of time-to-value. In this paper we will review both the challenges of a video and UC integration and the ways in which Polycom Professional Services can reduce schedule-risk and enhance the final outcome, providing better time-to-value.

Obstacles to Success

Software integration across vendors is a complex process, requiring detailed knowledge about both vendors’ products and interactions between them. Video conferencing and UC are no exception. A plethora of features provide many opportunities for focusing the solution on specific business issues of the company. This means that each integration and deployment is customized to the needs of the enterprise, creating integration issues that differ from standard deployments. To build these solutions efficiently, a team with deep knowledge of all components is needed.

Let’s review the potential challenges facing an enterprise which is about to integrate best-of-breed Polycom video with a Microsoft® UC solution.

Business Specific Challenges

The highest return on investment for voice and video deployments is often from Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) the intent of which is to reduce the human latency in a business process. These solutions focus the integrated video and UC infrastructure on specific use cases within the enterprise to shortcut the existing process and make it more responsive to the internal or external customer.

These CEBPs often require integration that has features specific to the implementing enterprise, which may not fit the standard categories defined by vendors of the UC or video conferencing equipment. These creative business solutions often require creative integration solutions to work.

In addition to the CEBP requirements, an enterprise may have specific corporate goals for video conferencing service delivery, such as availability, set-up time, the need for ad hoc conferencing as well as scheduled conferencing, integration with existing scheduling approaches or integration with existing legacy video conferencing, support for remote offices through the enterprise WAN or through VPN connections. Video conferencing with remote participants over the Internet may also be required.

Mixed vendor equipment environments are also common. The best strategic plan for having a single vendor solution across the enterprise may be thwarted by an existing infrastructure or by corporate acquisition, mandating “inter-vendor” interoperability.

Video Conferencing Is Different

On the surface, video conferencing looks as if it should be very similar to telephony, with the additional bandwidth requirement in the network and the need for an MCU for multipoint conferencing. The reality of a real video conferencing deployment is more complex.

Executive level conferences may need to be managed: to place calls ahead of meeting-time start, to frame the participants correctly on the screens, to support recording, streaming or security protocols, and/or to establish calls outside the organization. The legacy video conferencing infrastructure may require deployment of an ISDN gateway or H.323 gateway, and a different type of dial- string for connecting to those endpoints. Placement of critical video conferencing components must take into account their availability, access, bandwidth requirements and global latency incurred by topology and call patterns. These and other issues require video conferencing-specific knowledge to ensure that the design is highly reliable and meets the ease-of-use and functionality goals of the enterprise.

Multivendor Complexity Challenge

In today’s rapidly changing market, multivendor solutions promise to bring broad value while still providing best-of-breed functionality. But these integrations bring with them the risk of complexity and multivendor interoperability issues. Vendor-to-vendor interoperability may change as software revisions change. Interfaces may not behave the same way they did in a previous version, or in the version demonstrated during the sales process. And even if access to the right personnel within the two companies is possible, they may not have the same focus which can lead to delays in resolving issues or compromises in functionality.

Real-Time Network Challenge

Converged IP networks that support data, voice, video, and collaboration traffic must be properly designed to make sure that all applications perform with sufficient quality to meet the goals of the organization. Real-time traffic streams (voice and video) require a different design approach than supporting traditional data applications, an approach that affects bandwidth allocation, traffic classification, and quality of service (QoS) deployment, and may also require new measuring and monitoring tools. Video conferencing is the toughest application being carried on these networks today, requiring both high-bandwidth and low-loss, low-jitter transport.

Making sure the corporate network will properly support the video conferencing traffic is critical to a successful deployment. Network teams that have not previously supported video conferencing must learn the approaches necessary to support and monitor video conferencing traffic within the enterprise network.

User Learning Curve Challenge

The value of new tools is not realized until the enterprise employees have integrated their use into their daily business routines. User assimilation of the new technology is the second major component of time-to-value.

There are four key components that accelerate user assimilation, including:

•  Familiarity •  Ease of use •  Initial positive experience •  Internal marketing

A large number of hardware and software components may be involved in Microsoft and video conferencing integration including:

•  Microsoft® LyncTM Server 2010

 •  Microsoft Office Communications Server

 •  Microsoft Exchange Server

 •  Microsoft Outlook® 

•  Microsoft Active Directory®

•  Video and ITP endpoints

 •  Desktop video

 •  MCUs 

•  Polycom® CMATM and DMATM solutions 

•  DHCP, DNS and NTP Services

 •  SQL Servers

 •  Public Key Infrastructure 

•  Firewall traversal

 •  Conference Recording

 •  Network Bandwidth 

•  Network QoS 

•  Dial Plan 

•  Legacy video

A series of services may be required for the video conferencing solution that requires integration between the Microsoft and Polycom components, including:

•  Use cases 

•  Scheduling

 •  Presence

 •  Endpoint management

 •  Call negotiation and management 

•  Dynamic bridge management

•  PSTN integration 

•  Resource management and planning

Familiarity: If the user interface for the new technology is the same or very similar to what is already being used, the learning curve is short and workers intuitively understand how to make use of the new technology. This is of course one of the primary goals of UC integration, to make video conferencing an extension of the communications tools and/or scheduling tools already in use by the organization. If video conferencing meetings can be scheduled the same way that other meetings are scheduled, users will quickly understand how to do it. And if setting up a video call is equivalent to setting up a voice call, users will understand it quickly.

Ease of Use: Making the user interface easy also supports rapid uptake. Keeping the required number of steps to a minimum, making each step lead to the next, providing directory services or buddy-lists so users do not have to know or dial extensions, providing links in scheduling notices, and providing a similar user interface both on the desktop and on the room-based equipment all lead to a simple-to- use and intuitive approach. The right integration strategy can provide this simplicity.

Initial Positive Experience: A user who has a positive initial experience with video is much more likely to come back and use video again. A poor initial experience is much harder to overcome, and users will be reluctant to depend on the system for important meetings. Having the system properly deployed and tested before exposing it to the users is critical to user uptake and time-to-value.

Internal Marketing: Promoting the use of the new technology within the company is important for raising awareness and increasing usage. Internal marketing may promote the value of the video experience, the reduced travel requirement, the contribution to the environment, or it may align video use with a key executive sponsor. A positive internal push to use the technology will embolden workers to give it a try and to incorporate it into their daily work flow.

The highest ROI for the video conferencing investment will come with high utilization—and thus with enabled workers. Getting it right the first time, making the user interface easy and familiar and promoting the use of the technology within the organization will accelerate user uptake and thereby shorten the time-to-value.

Technical Resources Challenge

While the deployment of an integrated UC and video conferencing solution may have a short ROI, have corporate sponsorship and be an exciting new endeavor, the IT team may not have the resources to dedicate to the integration and deployment effort. IT teams today are under heavy pressure to increase productivity and decrease costs, and often are operating with a flat or reduced budget. Team members are managing more operational tasks than they were last month or last year.

A new deployment often needs the best and the brightest of the IT team to learn the new technology, design a solution, pilot the design and then roll it out within the organization. This requirement could remove these key technical team members from operational tasks for months. Who is going to handle the priority 1 trouble tickets during this effort? Will the occurrence of priority 1 tickets mean the schedule for the video integration slips, delaying deployment and impacting its ROI?

Education Challenge

Specific knowledge of the video conferencing and UC environment are needed to successfully deploy the video/UC integrated solution in a timely manner. While enterprise teams will undoubtedly have bright and skilled team members, they don’t know what they don’t know until they encounter it. New concepts, new types of network traffic and new challenges in integrating disparate systems all require learning. Training time may be at a premium, and the schedule may not allow for it.

Challenge Summary: Improving Time-to-value

Although the initial justification for deploying video conferencing may be based on hard dollar returns such as reducing travel costs, the real value comes with increased productivity, increased collaboration across geographic sites, better interpersonal relationships and increases in the speed of business. These ‘softer’ benefits are hard to quantify for a formal ROI analysis, but have returns that are much higher than travel reduction for enterprises that change the way they

do business through the use of video conferencing technology. These benefits are the strongest value provided by a video conferencing deployment.

The goal of a UC integrated video conferencing deployment is to bring these key benefits to the enterprise in an integrated manner so that the cost of administration is low, use of the technology is easy and intuitive, and users will quickly learn to take advantage of video and integrate it into their daily work. Once users are on board and using UC integrated video conferencing, the company will experience its benefits and value.

Polycom offers experienced professionals to support this transition, with exactly that goal in mind. Using the experience and expertise of the Polycom Professional Services team and learning from them during this transition can ensure a rapid, on-time deployment and

a positive initial experience for users.