For years we've talked about voice as an application and the possibility of running voice communications in a virtualized environment. The age of Virtualized software-based communications is now here.

Virtualization continues to be a leading trend in IT, so long gone are the days when unsupported hypervisor technology prevented real-time applications such as voice from being virtualized. In today’s world, voice virtualization removes the barriers between real-time and traditional line of business applications, enabling your Unified Communications (UC) applications to work to their fullest potential on a virtualized platform – without the risk of delays compromising system effectiveness. When voice applications are virtualized, your telephony hardware can be consolidated right alongside your computing infrastructure, further streamlining your communications network with simplified voice platform administration. With virtualization, your benefits come packaged in a cost-effective flexible infrastructure that allows you to meet capacity and deliver effective disaster recovery methods to ensure business continuity.

Perhaps the most compelling reason for virtualization is a reduction in overall hardware distribution and energy footprint, leading to capital expenditure cost savings. Additional benefits, such as simplifying administration and remote console access from a common hypervisor management system are powerful tools. Virtualization provides the simplicity of centralized access across all communication servers and eliminates the need for discrete hardware platforms traditionally used to support telephony, voice mail, call accounting, and more. 

So what are the additional benefits of virtualization, and how can they add the most value to your current strategy? We’ve put a list together of a few key advantages you can yield from a virtualized infrastructure:

1. Reduced number of servers – this can help lower your hardware costs significantly – by as much as 50-70%

2. “Green” adoption methods of VoIP/UC, which results in:

a. Less rack space in the Data Center
b. Lower HVAC requirements
c. Lower electrical requirements
d. Reduced number of server outages

3. Helps expand and promotes the number of applications throughout the enterprise at a relatively nominal cost (primarily for licensing)

4. Enables a cloud-computing model – servers can reside just about anywhere

5. Encourages open standards

6. Allows applications to be centrally run for an entire enterprise

7. Expands redundancy possibilities at a relatively nominal cost

8. Flexibility/Scalability: Apps can be added as needed in less time

9. Less maintenance, less hardware failures

10. Ability to manage voice, unified communications and collaboration just like any other application in your virtualized data center.

Virtualizing applications such as voice and related communication software services will certainly add additional value to your virtual infrastructure investment. With increased efficiencies, significant savings, multi-licensing capabilities and UC now more affordable than ever, virtualization is no doubt here to stay. What’s more, Unified Communications (UC) features such as conferencing, IM, and Presence, can now be deployed alongside other virtualized business applications in your software-based private or hybrid cloud solution. Virtualizing UC, contact center and software-based communications is nothing new for NEC.

We’ve provided you with 10 benefits of a virtualized environment, but the list goes on. Click below to see how NEC incorporates features such as enhanced video and contact center functionality to enhance productivity for your end users and give added simplicity to your IT staff to ensure you’re getting the biggest bang for your buck in a virtualized environment. Ready to learn more about what you can add to your virtualization strategy?

The internal debate on hosted versus on-premises might continue, which means, you’re still faced with the challenge of how you will acquire a unified communications solution without breaking your budget. In our last post we introduced financing, now let’s take a deeper look at your options and the best ways to apply them.

Leverage your financing options

OpEx financing models allow many organizations to leverage all the benefits of predictable monthly payments traditionally found in hosted solutions in an on-premises solution. For many, this can be the best of both worlds: a service-oriented model found with a hosted solution with none of the concerns some organizations may have with security and availability of a hosted service. What’s more, a $25,000 on-premises collaboration and audio conferencing solution may be a difficult solution to get approved, however, an on-premises solution with all of the capabilities of hosted for less than $400.00 per month can be a powerful internal conversation. Are you more comfortable paying out a lump sum or breaking payments down into a monthly scale? Regardless of where your preference lies, there is a financing option for you.

You don’t always have to spend money to make money. Sound too good to be true? Take a look at the following example:
ABC Company has identified that upgrading their current infrastructure provides an opportunity for significant cost savings. But there’s one problem: with no funds left in this year’s budget, their IT Department will pay more for their existing inefficient infrastructure until funds are available; not to mention the risks associated with operating an outdated system.

With financing, there’s another way.

Financing companies in the technology industry work to solve this common customer problem by offering plans that reduce up-front acquisition costs. The plans and programs come in the form of OpEx or CapEx with deferred payments (90-120 days is typical although longer deferments are available), step payments (increase or decrease over time) or seasonal payments (payments due during times of increased revenue for the customer). Bottom line, leverage a technology financing partner who offers the most accommodating (and cost reducing) structure for you.

 
So wherever you are in the process, you have options in choosing a solution that can be tailored to your specific needs without waiting until the approved budget kicks in. If you leverage the tools available to improve the communications services you deliver, you’ll reduce the risks associated with continuing to operate an outdated system. Just remember that with financing, you have options – the key in obtaining maximum value from these options is in how you leverage them.

When it comes to system upgrades, several IT funding initiatives are shifting their focus to cloud technology; what will you do when you need to upgrade your existing system, but don’t have the funds available in this year’s (or even next year’s) budget?  This is an opportune moment to examine your organization’s budget in regard to capital expenses (CapEx) versus operational expenses (OpEx), as implementing new technology will likely require you to switch a majority of your spending from CapEx to OpEx. Where does your primary focus lie? Respondents to an InformationWeek Analytics IT Budget Survey report that they are increasingly focused on calculating per-transaction service costs and implementing charge backs.

What you have vs. what you need
 
Are you paying monthly audio/web conferencing costs plus licensing fees for each user on your staff? If you answered yes, and that works best for your existing budget, then you might favor a hosted system versus a premises-based solution. A Frost & Sullivan report via TMCnews, notes that budget pressure and increased adoption of unified communications are driving demand for integrated web conferencing. While some look to hosted providers, the report also noted that as functional needs grow, organizations are expected to move to on-premises deployments. So who is best suited for a hosted system? If your organization can gain from the following benefits, then a hosted system may be right for you:

• low up-front costs (made possible through monthly billing) 
• standard software on a per-seat basis
• greater ability to free up internal support staff

Additionally, the move from CapEx- to OpEx budget focus has driven cloud-based UC offerings and workplace virtualization. We have evolved to replacing stationary desk phones with virtual, mobile alternatives such as soft phones, instant messaging (IM) and video features. Still in all, this move isn’t feasible for everyone. Economic downturn has forced organizations to reduce overhead, thereby increasing mobile working and the need for consistently evolving UC solutions.
 
What are your options?

There are pros and cons for both hosted/cloud based approaches as well as on-premises solutions. The shift from CapEx to OpEx funding is driving demand for hosted solutions, but IT departments accustomed to on-premises technology sometimes point to security and availability concerns as part of their reluctance to transition completely to a cloud alternative.

We’ve touched on the pros and cons, and for some, the consistent service delivery, on-demand scalability, and standard suite of UC options available with a hosted solution is most beneficial, while others will look to hybrid models as a compromise.

The good news is there’s still another way to get all the benefits of an OpEx acquisition and an on-premises solution without breaking your budget. We’ve got one word for you: financing. In the next post we’ll look at the different options that are available.  To learn more about your options, check out the video below.

We’ve all become attached to on-prem computing when it comes to our individual and business needs, so the abundance of skepticism around the cloud computing concept is understandable. The premise behind cloud computing is to “rent” space, and only pay for what you need, keeping cost and energy consumption at bay. Cloud offers benefits for both the individual and the organization, so is switching to cloud the right move for your organization? Of course, you’ll determine which of the following is top priority based on your business, but check this list out for a few things to consider when making your decision:

1) Demand & Growth: Is your organization’s growth sporadic or predictable? Assess your organization’s need before moving to cloud. Cloud favors scalable and on-demand deployments

The Harvard Business review cites research from by Gartner Vice President Mark McDonald, noting that the percentage of CIOs interested in cloud computing has grown considerably, from 5% in 2009 to 37% in early 2011. Management in larger companies have been more likely to name cloud as a “top five” IT priority. Assess your business needs and then supplement with technology to make your business the best it can be.

2) Data Privacy & Security: Is your organization one with rigid security requirements? Clouds were initially designed for individual or small group use, not larger organizations. Whether you need a system that will keep “intruders” out, or one that will control who has access within your company, Cloud computing vendors have taken this into consideration and implemented technologies to better protect devices. Bottom line: evaluate your organization’s security requirements when considering how cloud will accommodate you best.

3) Reliability and Bandwidth: Arguments have been raised questioning reliability of the cloud infrastructure versus an on-prem infrastructure. Regardless of which Cloud technology you choose to adopt, no connectivity makes cloud as useful as not having it at all.

4) Users base (Localized vs. Globally Dispersed):
Cloud enables collaboration between mobile users with ease, more so than on-prem computing. But if the majority of your users are localized, is moving to cloud the best decision for your organization?

5) Performance: While some of the greatest accomplishments achieved through Cloud technology is a result of its collaboration capabilities, look up-front at the important pieces that contribute to the performance for your organization. Will switching to cloud directly support your business operation? Will it enable your business to effectively generate revenue? Keep in mind that Cloud is just one component; application use and availability, along with bandwidth should be taken into consideration for your deployment.

Cloud computing gives you the opportunity to continue to compete effectively without owning all of the technology you use, and while the concept is nothing new, it forces the difficult consideration of consolidating your entire business framework in order to move applications like email, CRM, or storage to the cloud. It certainly merits a deeper look into the considerations above, particularly when you consider the added possibility of moving real-time applications like voice and unified communications to the cloud. Now that’s “food for thought.”

With all the talk of cloud computing and software as a service of late, many IT organizations are wondering how communications can be deployed realistically in these models.  This discussion inevitably leads to the topic of virtualization.

Among the highest-impact issues in IT today, virtualization allows multiple applications to run on virtual machines within one or more physical host servers. A hypervisor – from vendors such as VMware, Microsoft or others – allocates server resources for all virtual machines running on it. Virtualization has long been used in data centers to consolidate the number of physical servers, better utilize existing hardware, and improve application availability.

Centralizing applications in data centers and leveraging virtualization technology to minimize associated costs and complexities has for several years been a trend among IT departments of both enterprises and mid-sized organizations. Adding communications to virtualized environments brings complexity and special requirements that not every enterprise communications provider can deliver today.

NEC has verified that UNIVERGE Sphericall, the pure software-based communications platform, runs in both VMware® ESXi and Microsoft® Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 virtualized environments to deliver voice and unified communications services in various cloud and hosted scenarios.

Some potential use cases for software-based communications in virtualization include:

• Customers with virtualization initiatives to reduce data center costs and server “sprawl”
• Disaster recovery scenarios running virtualized instances in carrier hosted environment, or private cloud infrastructure.
• Implementing additional media service resources such as voicemail, auto attendant, music-on-hold and/or call recording using Sphericall virtualization
• Hosted provider scaling a single, large server with multiple instances of Sphericall where each instance is tied to a particular customer site  
• Small or remote offices desiring to hosted multiple applications on a single machine