Bring UC Back to Life with SIP Trunking Building your business communications foundation

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Summary..........................................................................................................................................................3

Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................3

Ovum view ......................................................................................................................................................3

How the journey started ..................................................................................................................................3

Having a SIP trunking platform as a foundation is critical ..........................................................................4

Second wave of applications and benefits .......................................................................................................4

Emerging applications (third wave) continue to grow .....................................................................................4

Impact of software, cloud, SaaS, and next-generation (OTT) players .........................................................5

Future view ......................................................................................................................................................6

The importance of global services and support ...........................................................................................7

Summary .......................................................................................................................................................8

Overview of the Tata Communications Global SIP Connect service ................................................................8

Contents

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SummaryIntroductionOvum has seen the transformation of the enterprise communications infrastructure during the past few years – a transformation that started with the deployment of SIP trunking. This transformation has turned into more of a longer-term, strategic journey than a singular voice network project. The benefits are now broader than network cost savings and growing beyond business collaboration and productivity. C-level executives (those in charge of corporate ICT infrastructure) need to understand the key drivers, the business productivity impact, and other major benefits as they embark on this journey.

Ovum viewOvum has been tracking the adoption of SIP trunking since 2008. Research identified cost savings as the major motivation for customers to embark on this transformation of corporate voice infrastructure. Initially, customers averaged cost savings of 45%. In fact, 90% of these early SIP trunking projects were focused on PBX connectivity cost savings.

Ovum’s SIP trunking work involved many of the major players in the SIP trunking ecosystem including network service providers, vendors (IPT and SBC), and large enterprise customers. In the early days of this transition, customers were replacing PRI trunking services with SIP trunking services. These transition projects quickly evolved into larger programs that included IPT consolidation (PBX standardization or replacement), conferencing, email, contact center, and other Unified Communications (UC) services. During the past few years, customers have realised that this has become a strategic ICT journey involving business communications integration along with IT infrastructure. This journey now has expanded to the global integration of many communications services (voice, video, and data) as well as IT services.

Recent information from Ovum’s global deals analysis suggests that voice transformation projects have doubled in the past four years and that SIP and IP transformation are part of 50% of global MNC customer contracts. Ovum expects this transformation to grow to more than 75% within the next two years. Most large, global customers have moved beyond assessment and into implementation. These large enterprise customers now require support and services as they expand their business communications infrastructure globally. Forward-thinking CIOs and IT decision-makers have found that this transformation has become a foundational technology platform required for business communications agility in serving both their employees and their customers.

How the journey startedIn 2008, during the early days of SIP trunking, Ovum found that the early drivers for starting the adoption were primarily simplified dialing plans, trunk diversity, and the dynamic features of SIP trunking, along with the previously mentioned reduction in network costs. During this initial phase of the journey, customers were focused on connecting all their major corporate sites, creating one dial plan, reducing voice trunks, and consolidating IPT infrastructure vendor. This initial IPT infrastructure focus led to many customers creating some standard equipment configurations, reviewing their multiple service agreements, and reducing both network and equipment vendors.

Initial benefits were centered on cost savings and simplified voice connectivity between major corporate sites regionally. However, customers started reevaluating their IPT vendors and standardise their IT infrastructure and their overall network requirements. Customers that took advantage of this initial SIP trunking transition began thinking more strategically about their entire global communications corporate infrastructure. This was the start of the journey and an early realisation that the transition to SIP trunking was evolving into a new corporate communications platform.

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Having a SIP trunking platform as a foundation is criticalAs customers moved to SIP trunking they created an IP/SIP trunking platform for all their business communications, not just voice applications. Customers started to consolidate, centralise, and standardise elements of this corporate platform, which eventually allowed expansion into other services. They also quickly saw that other business applications, including multimedia and various UC services, could easily be added. They then started to realise that having this IP/SIP trunking in place also allowed them to start looking beyond the initial quick-hit, voice-centric benefits and integration opportunities.

Second wave of applications and benefitsSince the initial adoption of SIP trunking was studied in 2009, Ovum has conducted further research and interviewed specific customers to identify the second wave of applications and benefits. This research identified new applications and benefits that went beyond the initial use cases. The integration and consolidation of business applications started to move into IT services such as email, storage, and voicemail. Next were increasing backup and diversity scenarios with the ability to reroute traffic for workload shifts, follow the sun, or outages. Applications were growing beyond simple voice services and into business productivity tools.

Consolidating email services quickly became very common, which expanded use cases beyond simple voice applications. Customers also used this transition to consolidate their network providers regionally and, in some cases, globally. Rationalising conferencing services (audio at first) and expanding collaboration services between sites was done by adding basic UC features (IM and presence). Integrating IVR services for contact centres and connecting individual contact centre locations for load balancing and time-of-day requirements became very common follow-on applications.

During this period, the major hosted contact centre service providers started to use the dynamic connectivity of SIP trunking for both internal consumption and connectivity to its customers. In addition, Ovum’s 2013 study on contact centre services identified that global carriers launched cloud-based contact centre services based on SIP trunking. This ability to quickly add contact centre services led to other cloud-based or hosted services. Now contact centre services have gone omnichannel and are driving the growing implementation of multimodal, multimedia SIP trunking.

Global requirements also became more critical and drove the need for expanded service coverage and connecting more than just a few U.S. and European locations. This second wave was centered primarily on the expansion of voice-centric communications, including interoperability, or making them more efficient or available to end users. Customers realised that their SIP-trunking and related infrastructure investment was more of a strategic platform and asset.

Emerging applications (third wave) continue to growOvum has observed that the more advanced services and applications being deployed are enabled by having this SIP/IP platform in place. Customers start to realise that other services (beyond voice) can easily be added and integrated.

Most customers do not want to manage the complexity of having many service providers or understanding service availability, the interconnections across regions, and individual country local service issues. Customers want fewer providers, fewer bills, and simplified implementation and maintenance. With increasing global service availability, customers are expanding their deployment footprint but want to reduce their number of their local providers. Integration and broader support for advanced IM, presence, and messaging platforms (e.g. Skype for Business/O365, Jabber, WebEx Cloud, Spark) have increased complexity and service management overhead. Conferencing support goes beyond simple audioconferencing to fully featured video and web conferencing options with many different vendor alternatives. Many new enterprise voice service offerings (e.g. Microsoft and Google) are now available to

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replace traditional voice services, but many customers need implementation support while they are moving to an integrated suite of voice and conferencing (audio, video, and Web) with business applications for their end users. Many of these new applications (like video) can now be supported with a reliable quality of service (QoS) globally.

Many large customers now have experience of using APIs for the flexibility and faster turn-up for integrating new services onto their SIP/IP platform and interconnection to services such as Twillio. WebRTC, omnichannel, and multimodal sessions will become part of the mix when implementing more advanced, integrated sessions for internal and external communication. For example, the adoption of enterprise video collaboration has been limited, despite the introduction of exciting new applications from industry leaders, including Microsoft and Cisco. The main reason for this is the absence of a simple and effective way to implement, control, manage and operate enterprise video traffic that supports these applications. The current networks have complex bandwidth provisioning mechanisms and disparate links for voice and video services, and lack optimal quality of service and budget control.

Ovum expects to see the expansion of new capabilities in 2016 and beyond, driven by advanced contact centre applications, expanding customer engagement tools, and the increasing use of “as-a-service” platforms. For example, customers can now add video services (e.g. WebRTC or jamveeTM) easily and quickly with a large variety of options to support large and small video use cases. This emerging (or third) wave of adoption includes a broader range of services beyond voice, deeper service integration, and multivendor interoperability between services and providers. Many more technologies, providers, and hybrid service models will need to be supported.

Impact of software, cloud, SaaS, and next-generation (OTT) playersSoftware, cloud and SaaS providers, and next-generation players have dual roles in the adoption and consumption of SIP trunking.

First, these players have been large consumers of SIP trunking and implemented it to enhance their global service platform to provide services globally to their customers. They were one of the early adopters of SIP trunking and realised early on how it really created strategic advantages in addressing their infrastructure needs for global availability, customer reach, and application performance. At the same time, these players are now driving innovation, new feature creation, and testing the limits of SIP trunking, global IP networking, and new service development. Multimodal, multimedia SIP implementation is just one current example of this innovation and what will quickly be adopted by other enterprise customers. It was this innovation that allowed next-generation players (Google, Microsoft) to provide more features and services to their enterprise customers. Now enterprise customers will be able to use it to offer their customers improved, integrated services.

Second, enterprise customers are now able to take advantage of these players’ cloud-based SaaS offerings and growing applications, which will speed up the adoption of these new services. These next-generation players may be Web-centric players (Google, Amazon), software vendors (Microsoft, Oracle, SAP), or any provider moving to hosted, cloud-based service offerings (PaaS, IaaS, UCaaS, Contact-Center-as-a-Service).

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Future viewEnterprise customers will have the ultimate flexibility to dynamically add, switch, and remove applications, providers, or services. This flexibility will include the ability to micro-segment service availability, mix and match services quickly, and allocate bandwidth dynamically based on application performance or end-user preference. The next-generation players will continue to move the application and content to the edge to create more personalised, responsive services. Global carriers, moving to a more software-centric network platform, will enhance their SIP/IP network offerings to allow increasing automation, service integration, on-demand features, and value-added services (network-based security, WAN optimization, hybrid WAN services). SIP trunking implementation within the enterprise market is growing into a more complex interoperability solution that requires increasing integration expertise and application knowledge.

Global providers need to dramatically increase their skills, expand their current strategic partnerships, and open their networks to both enterprise customers and next-generation players. New business models that allow services to be combined and delivered in new creative ways will need to be supported. Network services will be tightly integrated into many applications with end-to-end performance guarantees without the end user’s knowledge of the mix of providers involved. At the same time, the global providers will need to be able to open up network elements (OSS/BSS) and provide APIs to allow all customer segments and partners to create their own combination of services, enabling innovation and advanced service bundles.

Enterprise customers will have many new options to purchase services and applications with the network included from NextGen providers, application providers, software (SaaS) providers and with increasing uptime and improved service level agreements. These services will be available globally and customers will not be aware of the technology, networks or location of any necessary resources to make the service work. Business applications packages will also be very diverse and allow customers to have more choice of the services and less involvement with the individual vendors behind the scenes. Service partnerships between all the ecosystem vendors will create some very unique offers but also create some difficulty in making direct comparisons. In the end, enterprise customers will have more reliable, more integrated business application and communications services without managing all the required infrastructure.

Initial

• Network savings• Single dialing plan• Interconnection of corporate

sites• Dynamic bandwidth

Second wave

• IPT vendor consolidation• Trunk diversity and rerouting• Integration and consolidation of

IT services• Basic UC and contact centre

features

Third wave

• Advanced UC services• PSTN replacement• Hosted and cloud-based services

added• Full-featured contact centre

services• Variety of hybrid implementations• Multimodal implementations• Integration of SaaS services• Integration of business

applications

Future view

• Dynamic configuration of services and providers

• Carriers add more automation and on-demand network features

• Increasing integration of applications and network

• Applications go to the edge and include network

• Massive proliferation of channels

Figure 1: Customer applications, features and benefits: Initial, second, and third wave and future view

Source: Ovum

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The importance of global services and supportMany large carriers promote their offerings as being global, but few really have the ability to have a true, robust global IP network and coverage in emerging as well as developed countries with integrated end-to-end carrier-grade service level agreements across physical transport, MPLS, and SIP voice layers. A global proposition from any provider should:•Haveasinglecontractinplaceforallglobalservices.•Haveanunderstandingoftheglobal,national,andlocalrequirementsforglobalservicesbutalsodeep

service knowledge within each country and be able to manage the customer service requirements.•Offerglobalaccountsupport,includingsales,marketing,andoperationswherethecustomerneedsit.•Offerserviceavailabilityinbothemerginganddevelopedcountries,especiallymajorsites.•OfferimprovedandintegratedQoSforapplicationsandservicesthatdriveoverallapplication

performance and end-user experiences.•Offerlocalsupportforsales,operations,andnetwork,includinglanguage.•Haveacloseworkingrelationshipwithlocalnetworkandservicepartners.

Being a global carrier means combining these major elements to create the appropriate level of services and support. It means offering the service coverage, responsive support, and connectivity required for high-quality application performance. With the appropriate global services partner, customers will have the best platform to acquire the best services from suppliers as well as provide the best performance to their end users.

Early 2008Early SIP availability

Early 2009Early SIP adoption begins

with focus on voice and PRI replacement

Late 2009Dynamic bandwidth,single dialing plan

2011PBX/IPT consolidation

Late 2011Integration and consolidation

of IT services

Early 2013Basic UC and contact centre features

2013Advanced UC services added and PSTN replacement

Late 2014Full-featured contact

centre features

Early 2015Hosted and cloud-basedservices

Late 2015Increasing hybrid implementations

2016Business applications integrated and multi-modal implementations

Future viewDynamic configuration, automation, on-demand, applications with network and channel proliferation

First wave Second wave Emerging (third wave) Future view

1

2

3

4

5 6

7

8

9

1011

12

Figure 2: SIP adoption waves

Source: Ovum

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Summary•Voicewastheprimaryapplication,butnowallbusinessapplicationscanusethisplatform.•SIPdeploymentshaveevolvedbeyondbasictrunkingtothecreationofacompleteSIP/IPplatformforthe

enterprise, now being implemented globally for maximum impact.•Althoughinitially,implementingSIPtrunkingwasdrivenbynetworkcostsavings,itsbenefitshavesince

expanded into IT infrastructure savings, added ICT services, the integration of collaboration tools, and improved employee productivity, business agility, and application performance.

•UCisnowbecomingglobalintegratedcommunications,socustomersneedthinkmorestrategicallyaboutthe move to a SIP/IP platform.

•ThetransitiontoSIPtrunkinghasgrownintoabusinesstransformationprogramwithagrowingnumberof business productivity enablement projects.

•EnterpriseswithaSIP/IPplatforminplacecannowtakeadvantageofthemultiplecloud-based,SaaS-based services available.

•PSTNreplacementoflocalservicesandmultimodalSIPtrunkingimplementationsarenowcriticalserviceelements.

•Globalservicepartnerswillgiveenterprisesaccesstoglobalsuppliersandprovidethebestglobalperformance for their end users and respective customers.

Overview of the Tata Communications Global SIP Connect serviceTata Communications has a robust set of assets that frame its global SIP trunking offering. These are major ingredients to SIP/IP platform creation and include:•Coverage and reach. In addition to one of the largest, global IP networks with the most interconnection

points available in global data centres, Tata Communications has more than 1600 carrier partners, 780 mobile providers, and 700 VoIP operators globally to provide the best reach of any global carrier. Strong North American, European, and Asian service coverage is available it also offers critically important coverage among emerging markets such as India, South Africa, and the Middle East.

•Features. Tata’s expansive reach – 100+ countries (ITFS), 45+ countries (UIFN), 40+ countries and 300+ cities (LNS), 75 countries (ITFS with service access codes) – is the best in the industry. Along with one of the broadest and most robust sets of SIP trunking features, Tata Communications also offers features such as full PSTN replacement (19 countries currently with expansion planned), which allows customers to replace the local provider. Its multimodal functionality allows customers to implement and integrate many business applications beyond business voice such as video and WebRTC. The service also includes differentiated, optimal QoS levels to allow customers to support more sensitive applications such as live video, multicast, and emerging interactive media. Given Tata Communications’ network infrastructure and interconnection capability, customers have access to broad trunk diversity and redundancy by routes and carriers.

•Strategic partners. Tata Communications has a strong set of network and UC vendors, and cloud-based services and integration firms in its strategic partner portfolio to address the requirements of SIP integration, adding services, and providing a wide range of customer choice. Web players, application service providers, cloud providers, data-center operators, developers, software vendors, SIs/IT vendors, and other network providers are all part of its partner ecosystem. Its partners also give Tata Communications the knowledge and experience to truly implement reliable multivendor solutions.

•Customer service. Ease of doing business, faster provisioning cycles, and partner support are key elements of the Tata Communications global service model. Next-generation portal access and APIs for customer interface allow improved integration (order and trouble ticketing) and responsive communication with each customer’s internal staff and any back-office requirements. With the network, communications services, and partners all provided by Tata Communications, customers can have an integrated, end-to-end SLA to ensure the best application performance and increased reliability.

•Support services. The installation, program management, and professional services that are required for the proper assessment, design, timely installation, repair, technology refresh, and ongoing support for global SIP trunking services are all part of the Tata Communications portfolio. Ovum has seen that nearly

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100% of enterprise customers making the transition to SIP trunking require professional services to successfully assess and deploy SIP trunking at the start of this journey.

•Commercials. Integrated carrier-grade SLAs across physical transport, MPLS and SIP voice layers, a comprehensive white-label program, in-country billing capabilities, and multi-language support are just some of the major differentiating elements in the Tata Communications Global SIP Connect service portfolio. Global wholesale and retail customers will appreciate the commercial flexibility, global scope, and ease of doing business that Tata Communications offers. The white-label program allows SIs, integrators, and other providers to brand and resell the Tata Communications SIP Connect service portfolio.

Figure 3: Tata Communications’ Global SIP Trunking for Enterprise Voice

Source: Tata Communications

ABOUT OVUM

Ovum is a leading global technology research and advisory firm. Through its 180 analysts worldwide it offers expert analysis and strategic insight across the IT, telecoms, and media industries. Founded in 1985, Ovum has one of the most experienced analyst teams in the industry and is a respected source of guidance for technology business leaders, CIOs, vendors, service providers, and regulators looking for comprehensive, accurate and insightful market data, research and consulting. With 23 offices across six continents, Ovum offers a truly global perspective on technology and media markets and provides thousands of clients with insight including workflow tools, forecasts, surveys, market assessments, technology audits and opinion. In 2012, Ovum was jointly named Global Analyst Firm of the Year by the IIAR.

For more details on Ovum and how we can help your company identify future trends and opportunities, please contact us at enquiries@ovum.com or visit www.ovum.com. To hear more from our analyst team join our Analyst Community group on LinkedIn www.ovum.com/linkedin and follow us on Twitter www.twitter.com/OvumTelecoms.

ABOUT TATA COMMUNICATIONS

Tata Communications is a leading global provider of New World Communications™ to multinational enterprises and service providers, including voice, data, network, collaboration and mobility solutions. Almost a quarter of the world’s internet routes travel over the company’s network.

This 710,000 km fibre network enables truly global unified communications. It also connects four out of the world’s five mobile subscribers and carries 53 billion minutes of wholesale voice traffic annually. More than 300 of Fortune 500 companies use Tata Communications’ state-of-the-art cloud, mobility, and network services. Through Tata Communications’ pioneering IZO cloud enablement platform, enterprises are able to connect to the giant clouds of Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com, who account for almost 50 percent of cloud computing.

Tata Communications’ systems integrate with 1,600 partners, 785 mobile operators and 700 VoIP (voice over internet protocol) operators. The company is the 2014 Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific data communications service provider of the year and featured as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for global network service providers for 3 years in a row. With connectivity to more than 240 countries and territories across 400 PoPs, Tata Communications provides a modular portfolio of Unified Communications solutions including global SIP, unified conferencing, managed services, UCaaS, cloud contact centre, and real time communication APIs.

To learn more about Tata Communications and its Global SIP trunking offerings, please visit: http://www.tatacommunications.com/products-services/enterprises/unified-communications/global-sip-connect