Gabriel Vizzard is global leader, emerging broadband solutions and pervasive wireless services at IBM. iStart met with Vizzard and Mark Badenach (wireless & emerging solutions business development manager for Australia and New Zealand) to discuss the local use of IP telephony from a practical perspective, and the global trends and innovations helping it to revolutionise the telecommunications landscape.

Vizzard hardly uses the acronym VoIP during our conversation – or even IP telephony. His buzzword is SIP, the Session Initiation Protocol that enables service providers to offer not only voice services over the internet, but also enhanced services, such as unified communications, streaming video and audio, text, instant messaging and pictures.

Inward looking, outward convergence
His message was clear, before long, SIP is likely to replace H.323, the current IP standard for voice and video, which allows products to communicate with H.323-compliant products by providing device-to-device, application-to-application and vendor-to-vendor interoperability. In a project begun by IBM’s chairman, Sam Palmisano, and his corporate technology team, IBM began looking at what SIP could mean for businesses and the company’s offerings to them.

Around 35 percent of IBM’s 40,000-strong workforce are mobile at least part of the time. With IP telephony, the company has reduced the number of its PBXs and switches — and its operating costs in the bargain.

IBM’s research into the session initiation protocol has led to a SIP application server becoming an IBM services offering, and Vizzard says in time it will become abase part of all the company’s middleware. IBM also has Workplace Client Mobile Edition, which is an embedded software platform.

“We have a device manager agent and a connection manager client on there that enables persistent IP connections across multiple different network types, and it’s also an embedded platform for smaller devices. It runs on the Linux, Pocket PC, 2003, Windows XP, Symbian operating systems, so it runs on the Sony Ericsson P910i and the new Nokia 9500,” Vizzard says.

The company is now working on the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) client for that platform, because it believes SIP-enabling business applications is crucial for the future delivery of voice.

“Lotus Workplace (which is the new name for what we know as Lotus Notes) has a SIP client in it, and it has the Sametime client in there, so it registers presence. And we have now a soft-IP phone that enables the user, from their phone book, to just click and actually make the phone call. It uses the SIP client to go to a SIP proxy, send the phone call to another SIP client and make the internal phone call. It really builds a lot of efficiency into the business.”

For Vizzard, the big wins in IP telephony come from intelligently managing communications. “How do you get the right person on the phone at the right time? If the person you need to get is not available, how do you get somebody associated with that person on the phone?” IBM started to look where many IT vendors would, inhouse – to its instant message product, Sametime. It analysed all of IBM’s instant messages, of which there were in the region of four million a day, looking for recurrences. The result of the investigation was a revelation.

The most common messages were “Where are you?” and “What phone number can I reach you on?” IBM’s Research Laboratory took its Sametime Instant Messaging engine and built a new application that allowed a user to identify the device via which they would prefer to be reached. “We’re putting the efficiencies into the business by understanding how people can be reached and where,” Vizzard says.

Single network infrastructure
For customers considering voice and data convergence, an obvious cost benefit is in moving two networks into one. More importantly, Vizzard says, savings made through improvements to business processes should be ploughed back into the voice network to realise further savings. Badenach agrees.

“Talking about the cost benefits is one thing, but we’re getting them into the business transformation. If you save 25 percent on your calls, and then spend 5 percent of that saving on business transformation, you can save another 10 percent – that’s the sort of approach IBM takes to differentiate itself from its competitors.”

IBM has a local project that is likely to generate a lot of interest in the health industry on both sides of the Tasman. “We’ve been doing a project in a hospital environment with a device that reduces the workload for personnel because they’re not running back and forth any more,” Vizzard says. “This device talks to a voice recognition engine and it’s all hands-free.”

The Vocera device is currently in operation in Australia, Badenach explains, where a pilot is running in the emergency department of Blacktown Hospital, Western Sydney Area Health Service.

“Forty-seven of those devices are being used by nurses and doctors. Nurses can make a call to the doctor when they’re at the bedside, they can order drugs to be sent to the bedside from that device, and now, using voice recognition, they can press the button and it’ll connect them straight through using the wi-fi network within the hospital. The compelling reasons for this are huge, given the efficiency gains hospitals are looking for.”

Internal marketing tactics
For many organisations, Vizzard says, replacing a standard PBX would be equivalent to throwing away money. “If they’ve just bought it and are happy with it, there’s no need to replace it. Not everybody’s going to benefit immediately from voice and data convergence. Which is why we focus on the business process issue, because you have to look at the total impact of decisions.”

The efficiency improvements to be had from IP telephony range from the mundane – such as not having to rewire buildings or reconfiguring settings for staff – to strategic-level decisions, Vizzard says. Because, traditionally, it hasn’t been the CIO who manages a firm’s PBX. “In a 1000-employee company, typically, the person who manages and runs the PBX is the CEO. The IT executive runs the network. So you have two different skill sets managing two different systems. When you have voice and data convergence, you have one network.”

Convincing the CEO
Local CIOs and IT directors agree that their biggest challenge is that while their IT budgets are either shrinking or static, the business expectation for IT to deliver is growing. Vizzard takes a pragmatic approach to this when discussing an IP telephony investment. “The IT budget doesn’t necessarily leave the company. Some of the IT budget may just have been moved into the departments, and that means you have to start talking about what the business process benefits are. Being connected is really important for competition – your revenues and your market share can go up or down three per cent, just because you didn’t reach the right people at the right time.

For more information
www.ibm.co.nz

Verdon Kelliher
verdon.kelliher@nz.ibm.com
09 359 4022

November 2004

By Chris Bell

IBM's Gabriel Vizzard (rear) and Mark Badenach