Business agility demands real-time collaboration and communication between employees, partners, suppliers, and customers - in a global context. It also demands collaboration between and beyond heterogeneous networks and services. As enterprises deploy unified communications applications for services such as voice, video, presence, instant messaging, conferencing, calendaring, directory, identity, and address book, the enablement of real-time collaboration across enterprises and domains demands solutions that are high-performance, interoperable, policy-regulated, and secure.
Interdomain Federation is secure, policy-regulated collaboration between multiple enterprises or public domains that enables the exchange of messaging and presence information between users. Federation is achieved by mediating between services or across a large number of proprietary or standards-based protocols. These domains may be in separate enterprises or represent subdomains within the same enterprise.
Aricent's Unified Communications (UC) Federation allows enterprises to federate their disparate UC platforms with other enterprises to create a new collaborative environment. This paper discusses the new enterprise experience, in which inter-domain federation is established between multiple UC Platforms across enterprises.
Unified Communications is becoming the solution of choice for not only high-flying enterprises with shrinking travel budgets, but for small and medium businesses as well. Adoption of UC in enterprises is accelerating as more and more enterprises embrace the need for software-powered communications beyond their network boundaries to facilitate communication and collaboration anytime, anywhere among colleagues, vendors, and customers around the globe. Forward-looking enterprises are deploying enterprise UC solutions to improve communications, increase collaboration, and improve worker productivity. A further step would be to collaborate seamlessly internally and across corporate boundaries.
The need to integrate information across IT, telephony, and mobile devices has led more and more enterprises to implement UC. Enterprises require user presence information to be reflected across fixed, mobile, and IP networks so that users are contacted at appropriate times. Presence federation becomes challenging when service providers try to integrate proprietary vendor solutions across multiple devices. The availability of diverse enterprise systems (OCS, IBM Sametime, Google Apps, Cisco, and Jabber) and public systems (GTalk, Yahoo) poses a challenge for information exchange between systems and creates the need for an integrated environment.
Because UC platforms support voice and video calls, users should be able to escalate their chat sessions to voice or video through the click of a button. Peer-to-peer and multi-party voice and video calls, and ad hoc conferences across enterprise boundaries, will add a new dimension to communication across diverse and disparate UC platforms.
In addition to presence, enterprises are looking for exchange of data between multiple UC vendor platforms, both public and enterprise. Users should be able to easily exchange documents, images, and videos across platforms subject to security and data model preferences. Also, enterprises need interoperable platforms that can seamlessly integrate with their current and future IT infrastructure, thereby minimizing the risk of platform dependency. Currently, many enterprise UC solutions use proprietary protocols, which makes the UC system very rigid. Enterprises are demanding protocol convergence across different proprietary standards. Service providers will need to start selling systems based on open standards like Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), and SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) to serve a wide range of buyers.
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