Several seemingly unrelated product introductions and refinements herald the next generation of Conversational Access Technologies (CAT). They also spell a challenge to enterprise IT personnel responsible for assimilating new technologies as systems become unmistakably more conversational. The message is “Be prepared.” In this case, it means an ounce of policy [regarding such things as the installation and use of IM-clients] is worth hours of technical support or even disaster recovery in the future.

Last week, Microsoft went public with the beta of Live Communications Server 2005 which will be generally available in the first quarter of 2005. That timing will coincide with the roll-out of the “Wireless 411 Services” providing listings to callers from both landline and wireless telephones. The third product under discussion in this column is Verisign’s “Network Routing Directory”, and its whole SIP7 product suite, which will enable ‘peering’ among the network elements (both IP and tradition) that make VoIP calls possible.

The net effect (pun alert!) will be fundamental changes in ease at which people can initiate phone conversations on an enterprise’s wide area network (WAN) or virtual private network (VPN). This heralds much more promise for the ‘Rich VoIP Applications’ (RVAs) that expand the list of sustainable businesses that can be built on top of plain vanilla VoIP. In short, here’s where NextGen services start to get fun, interesting and profitable as calls are initiated by people using their favorite instant messaging (IM) service or by people who use a button on a Web site to transfer to a live agent or technician in the course of a service called “Web Assist.”

The IT department plays the central role in defining the scope and pace for staging an enterprise’s customer facing applications. Customer service resources span Web sites, contact centers, IVR systems and e-mail management resources. It should be the mission of every IT department to ensure that the customer experience through each of these channels remains both consistent and salutary. The systemic walls that divide IT operations into silos are tumbling down in the name of enhanced, multimodal or multichannel customer service.

Yet a slew of early indicators reveal that they are not yet ready and that, barring concerted efforts that virtually pre-package secure mobile access and real-time communications, IT departments are receiving little help in the way of bullet-proofing their environments.

Microsoft Live Server: ‘Federation’ to the Rescue
The codename for Live Communications Server 2005 is “Vienna”, but the associated real-time IM client codenamed “Istanbul” has the greatest potential to accelerate CAT throughout enterprises running on the Windows operating system. Istanbul’s importance comes from its ability to give users IM-like control over telephone calls. It is an update of Live Meeting, which means that it will install itself much like Windows Messenger when new copies of Office or Outlook are invoked. As an update of Live Meeting, it will have strong links to corporate conferencing (both audio and video), the first “aha!” moments will come when users are presented with screen-based options for handling incoming telephone calls. In effect, recipients of IP-based phone calls will be able to use their IM client as they would a robust “call waiting” utility. They can take a call, route it to voice mail or ignore the call.

The implications for IM control of telephone calls is more promising when it is put in the context of a contact center or “customer interaction center.” Although tremendous investment has gone into beefing up the capabilities of corporate Web sites for handling customer inquiries and e-commerce, empirical evidence shows that the preponderance of inbound customer contacts (in excess of 80% for some industries) continue to be initiated over the telephone to IVR systems or live agents in contact centers. The next generation of self service applications will involve IP-telephony and voice-based conversations more deeply. It is the role of the IT department in this context to make information assets and applications accessible to information seekers through a variety of channels and conversations.

How to Handle Wireless Listings in the Enterprise
Meanwhile, in another part of the telephony forest, Verizon Wireless has lent its voice to the silent contingency of individuals and IT executives who have a deep concern about making wireless phone numbers available to people who call directory assistance. The issue is hot today because a consortium of wireless service providers chartered by the CTIA (Cellular Telephone and Internet Association) has contracted with Portland, OR-based Qsent to make it possible for wireless subscribers to have their numbers made available to directory assistance service providers in a way that costs them nothing and protects their privacy.

A considerable amount of controversy already swirls around the balance between DA listings and individual privacy. If a wireless handset is owned by a business enterprise and made available to an employee through the corporation, many are arguing that the enterprise IT department (or at least the telecommunications staff) should set the policy regarding wireless listings. One analyst went so far as spelling out a doomsday scenario, calling wireless telephone numbers the “DNA for the mobile handset” and saying that release of wireless telephone numbers is an invitation for hackers to compromise the underlying operating system.

We are less concerned about issues of hacking a corporate WAN through wireless handsets. After all, if it were so easy to spread viruses around wireless IP addresses, no employee should be allowed to put a wireless number on her business card. To the extent the handset is registered to the enterprise, and is billed to same, the enterprise IT department needs to formulate a wireless 411 policy for its phones and the employees who use them. The opt-in process for wireless 411 allows the phones to be listed as enterprise, or individuals, and provides IT management the flexibility it needs to develop a policy. The only ‘wrong’ policy is no policy at all.

Verisign’s SIP7 Solution
Assuring end-to-end quality for IP-based telephone calls that originate from traditional phone lines, cross corporate firewalls, query corporate directories (NAT’s) for routing instructions and are transferred many times in the course of a “session” is not a trivial pursuit. We were very interested to see a presentation of Verisign’s suite of products that provide key infrastructure elements for VoIP to, in essence, mimic the capabilities of traditional phone calls. As Verisign sees the world, over 150 million telephones are now hooked up to corporate PBXs and, as they end their service life, there is substantial economic incentive to churn out the old and churn in new IP-PBXs.

Verisign has products that fill significant gaps in the IP-telephony infrastructure. In effect, they connect the islands that are created when Verizon, for instance, uses a different set of codecs and other network elements than AT&T. The differences that have to be reconciled on-the-fly include security, protocol internetworking, directory services and application delivery. Verisign is, by Opus Research’s estimate, the only entity with an end-to-end offering that promises to help enterprise IT managers, as well as service providers, smooth out the important rough spots that jeopardize service quality as they migrate from the existing switched telephone network (sometimes called TDM, for “time division multiplexing”) to the world of VoIP.

“Be Prepared”
In addition to Microsoft, Verisign and wireless carriers, there are multiple stakeholders up and down the telephony and voice processing ecosystem. This is the beginning of the endgame of investment and development efforts by the likes of IBM, BEA, Cisco, Genesys Labs, Avaya and many others who’s software roadmaps meld IP-telephony, a ‘service-oriented architecture’ (SOA) and distributed processing (involving applications servers, media servers, telephony infrastructure and robust middleware). Their roadmaps bring contact centers more intimately into the Internet cloud. To use Cisco’s words, it transforms enterprise resources into a ‘customer interaction center’. This benefits the aforementioned companies, so-called ‘Big Iron’ becomes ‘Big Code’ and integrators reign. But it also creates markets for innovative software products and tools from firms who are not household names – like TuVox, Audium, Vocalocity, Voice Objects, Vicorp and others.

The pace of uptake for conversational access technologies (CAT) is increasingly in the hands of IT executives. The demands on new IT infrastructures grow from the need to support multichannel access to customer service resources and the growth in the population of employees and other stakeholders through mobile devices and clients. The steady stream of query-and-response interactions rely, increasingly on resources that ignore traditional divisions between departments and functional groups. Thus the IT departments have to confront some new questions of their own.

For example: What rules need to be established to govern inbound phone calls that originate from IM clients? What is corporate policy for guaranteeing security of wireless endpoints – be they full-featured handsets, Blackberries, etc? Who manages the directory listing for wireless phones that are owned by the company and issued to employees? Will they recognize that CAT is a vital part of live communications services?

We have made much of standards that include XML (including VoiceXML), IP and judicious use of Java applets and servlets to extend the reach of CAT to a growing mix of intelligent mobile devices. However, as every reader who’s been on the wrong side of a corporate firewall or has tried to access a Web-based e-mail service (Hotmail, Yahoomail, gmail, etc) while sitting in a corporate office, cubicle or conference room knows, the standards do no good when peer-to-peer interactions are verboten as a matter of policy.

The migration from TDM to VoIP is necessary, but it is still bound to take the better part of the next three years. It will never happen unless IT departments begin establishing the policies today.

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