Cost-savings long has been a selling point for companies that deal in Internet telephony and unified communications.

 

In this recession, as businesses look to leverage technology to cut costs, VoIP and UC solutions become even more attractive to those who look to – as Covergence vice president of marketing Rod Hodgman (News - Alert) says – “spend-to-save.”

 

Hodgman’s Maynard, Massachusetts-based company provides solutions that help the so-called “Global 1000” switch from legacy voice to voice as a low-cost Web service.

 

To that end, Covergence (News - Alert) recently introduced what it calls its “Covergence Session Manager,” or “CSM” – a solution that transforms voice dial-tone to an IP network function without ripping and replacing existing telephony infrastructures.

 

It’s an attractive proposition, as many companies no longer can afford the operating expense of two different approaches to voice and data, and seek to integrate disparate voice systems into a cohesive IP architecture that reduces costs and improves communications.

 

TMCnet recently caught up with Hodgman – a 25-year IT industry veteran – and had a chance to talk to him about CSM. He told us that one Covergence client using CSM, a Fortune 50 company, no less, reduced telephony operating expense by over 60 percent – $12 million – annually, and returned the capital to purchase the solution inside of nine months.

 

Our exchange follows.

 

 

Rod Hodgman (pictured left): Certainly there are budget cuts in this down economy, but there are also organizations that look to spend-to-save. Our Session Manager customers are organizations that are searching for cost savings in every business process and for these customers it’s no longer possible to justify the costs associated with the two different approaches to voice and data. We enable our customers to increase productivity, profitability and shareholder value by collapsing voice and data networks, consolidating PBXs and transforming dial-tone and presence into Web services. One of our customers, a Fortune 50 company, reduced telephony operating expense by over 60 percent – $12 million – annually, and returned the capital to purchase the solution inside of nine months.

 

 

RH: Our focus has been enabling the Global 1000 to transition from legacy voice to voice over IP. Working closely with these customers, we learned that the major barriers to transitioning their voice networks to IP were at the core of the network. These organizations have between 500 and 1,000 PBXs from multiple vendors spread out over many locations.

 

Today, these PBXs are islands of communications. They are deployed on proprietary hardware, generally accessible only to proprietary endpoints with low-level, vendor-specific APIs that require telephony knowledge on the part of the developer and integrator and route communications over the PSTN, not the IP network. It resembles the situation when legacy, proprietary mainframes had to be integrated into the enterprises IP networks and distributed applications.

 

Middleware encapsulates legacy systems and provides access to those systems as a set of network services. This approach separates the users/endpoints from the details of the service implementation (the PBX (News - Alert)) which makes it possible for the organization to migrate off the PSTN and consolidate their PBXs without impacting the users.

 

 

RH: Consolidating and encapsulating common voice functions into a set of shared SOA components is critical. It allows us to move routing, control, monitoring and interoperability out of the individual PBXs and into a common SOA-based session layer. Creating a vendor independent session layer, as specified by 3GPP, IMS and other standard bodies, puts control into the infrastructure and enables organizations to centrally managed and control their voice service.

 

Creating a communications infrastructure with Web 2.0 interfaces removes many of the most difficult barriers to developing and deploying communication-enabled applications. Web 2.0 used in the context of application development refers to a collection of development models, protocols and standards (HTTP, XML and JavaScript) that are familiar to the large, low-cost Web developer market. So it does two things: first, it lowers the development barrier by making it easy for Web developers to embed voice into applications to transform it into another potential component within a ‘mash-up’ tool.

 

Secondly, it provides a simple lightweight, standards-based, distributed computing model that uses HTTP without an additional messaging layer such as SOAP. This makes it possible to put voice and presence into browser-based applications. For enhanced programmer productivity we provide a set of AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) classes. AJAX is a group of Web development techniques used for creating interactive Web applications. AJAX Web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. AJAX is perfect for putting voice and presence into browser-based applications.

 

 

RH: President-elect Obama appears to be tech-savvy and is focused on getting our economy back on solid footing. He recognizes the critical role technology plays in keeping the United States competitive in increasingly global markets. We look forward to policies that enhance our educational system and strengthen our ability to compete globally.

 

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