The Path to Convergence
by Jim Metzler

The goal of this paper is to reduce the gap between the enthusiasm of the networking vendors and trade publications for the topic of convergence and the reluctance on the part of enterprise users to implement it.
As a first step towards that goal, we must agree as to what is meant by convergence. To the author, a converged infrastructure is comprised of one or more of the following components:
 
Converged Applications
Deploying applications that use a combination of voice, data, and video.

Converged Network
Combining one or more forms of traffic onto a single LAN and/or WAN. The traffic types include voice, different types of data, and video.

Converged Management
Combining the tools, processes, and people that currently manage disparate pieces of the IT infrastructure into a common, efficient system.
 
Perhaps the most discussed aspect of convergence is IP Telephony. The author uses the term IP Telephony to mean providing voice service over an IP network in a manner such that the users of the service have virtually the same experience that they would have had if the voice had been transported over a circuit switched network. However, in order to accomplish this, the network must provide low, predictable delay as well as the key features of a voice service that users have come to expect.

For convergence to be successful in the marketplace, it must add business value. There are many cases where this is possible. For example, many companies want to create tighter relationships with customers, suppliers, and distributors. It is now possible to provide a single interface to the customer (converged network) for all types of interaction, while providing customer care applications that combine voice and data (converged applications) and Policy Management (converged management) to ensure that applications get the resources they need.

Two key components of managing a converged infrastructure are policy management and service level management. The author uses the phrase "policy management" to refer to the ability to dynamically configure traffic flows based on user, application, or outside event. As defined, policy management has both a tactical and a strategic impact. On a tactical basis, policy management allows IT professionals to both automate and apply intelligence to configuring the IT infrastructure. On a strategic basis, policy management enables:
_      Directory Integration,
_      Quality of Service, and
_      Security,
end to end across the network.

A converged WAN consists of either converged WAN access or a converged WAN backbone, and it logically extends the concept of IP Telephony to include multiple applications on a common data-centric WAN. The phrase "converged WAN access" refers to the dynamic combination of voice, video, and data traffic onto a single transmission group from an enterprise location to the carrier's Point of Presence (POP). To understand how converged WAN access can help to reduce costs, consider a company that has 200 branch offices with multiple T1s from each branch office to the carrier's POP. Assume that the average monthly cost of these T1s is $500 and they are statically configured to carry voice, SNA, and IP traffic. Further assume that by deploying Inverse Multiplexing over ATM (IMA), the enterprise reduces one T1 per office. This results in a $100K monthly savings, or $3.6 million over a three-year life cycle.
 
A converged WAN backbone can help an enterprise both to save money and to compete better in the marketplace. Nortel Networks is a good example of a company who has achieved these two goals by deploying an ATM wide area network to carry voice, data, and video traffic. Five years ago, the company had seven separate but overlapping networks serving the voice, data, fax, and video needs of roughly 60,000 users in both Nortel Networks and Bell Northern Research locations worldwide. Nortel Networks deployed a network based on carrier-provided ATM services in the U.S. and T3s both to and within Canada. The network carries all of Nortel Networks' traffic and had a payback period of less than a year. In addition, the network has reduced Nortel Networks' time to implement network upgrades and has scaled in a manner that most likely would not have been possible with the prior disparate WAN infrastructure.

As we enter the next millennium, the competitive pressures on businesses will only increase. In addition, over the next several years, the success or failure of a business will increasingly be linked to the success or failure of the IT organization. Given these pressures, it is critical that the IT organization expand their efforts to align the goals of the IT organization with those of the business. What is so appealing about the deployment of a converged infrastructure is that the benefits it offers match up so well with the most common issues that currently impact business. However, to realize the benefits of convergence, today IT organizations need to deploy the infrastructure that can support it. They also need to develop and implement a plan to ensure that they have the skills in the organization to interface with the Business Units on a more strategic basis, as well as to implement and manage the new technologies.

1.0 The Myths and Realities of Convergence
It is hard, if not impossible, to find a networking vendor who is not strongly advocating the deployment of convergence. It is equally difficult to read an industry publication and not find one or more articles discussing the advantages of convergence. However, when asked, most enterprise IT organizations state that they are notably less committed to convergence than either the networking vendors or the industry publications. The purpose of this paper is to reduce the gap between the enthusiasm of the networking vendors and trade publications and the reluctance on the part of enterprise users.  In order to accomplish this, the paper will synthesize some of the existing documentation relative to convergence, crisply identify the benefits of convergence, discuss the key challenges relative to managing in a converged environment, provide examples of how Nortel Networks has begun to deploy convergence within their internal network, and suggest some next steps for those enterprise IT organizations looking to evaluate convergence.

Enterprise organizations that are evaluating whether or not convergence makes sense for them face a number of hurdles. One such hurdle is that there is not a common definition in the industry as to what convergence means. A second hurdle is that there are several myths surrounding the benefits of convergence as well as the difficulty of deploying it.

The purpose of defining the term convergence is to be able to succinctly and accurately debate the value of convergence to the enterprise. One possible way to define convergence would be very broad. Using this approach, the definition would include things like the industry's convergence onto Ethernet as the LAN technology of choice for the desktop, or the industry's convergence onto TCP/IP as the protocol of choice. However, since both of these phenomena have already occurred, including them in the definition of convergence will not facilitate the debate over the viability of convergence on a going forward basis.
To facilitate this debate, the definition of convergence needs to include components that are not already realized in the marketplace but which offer significant promise of being realized. Towards that end, the author suggests that a converged infrastructure is comprised of one or more of the following components:

Converged Applications
Deploying applications that use a combination of voice, data, and video.

Converged Network
Combining multiple forms of traffic onto a single LAN and/or WAN. The traffic types include voice, different types of data (i.e., email and ERP), and video. This can also refer to combining multiple traffic types onto a single circuit between an enterprise's offices and their carrier's Points of Presence. The most talked about instance of this type of convergence is moving voice, fax, and video applications over an IP infrastructure.

Converged Management
Combining the tools, processes, and people that currently manage disparate pieces of the IT infrastructure into a common, efficient system.
As previously mentioned, there are several myths surrounding convergence. The following list of myths is based on a Lucent document.

Myth: Convergence means that everything a company has today will soon be obsolete.
Reality: Convergence is both an evolution and a revolution. Many parts of today's networks will continue to deliver value for years. In addition, there are instances in which separate networks will continue to exist.

Myth: Convergence means just running voice over a legacy data network.
Reality: To be successful, converged networks must be able to deliver virtually the same quality of voice services that customers have come to expect. However, the current lack of reliability, manageability, and security of most data networks precludes the broad deployment of voice over these legacy data networks. In addition, as voice applications migrate to a converged environment, customers expect the same call billing services they have today in their voice environment. This level of billing is virtually non-existent in a data network.

Myth: Convergence is primarily about cutting costs.
Reality: Convergence offers the potential to cut costs as well as to provide a competitive advantage to the enterprise. This competitive advantage typically is a result of the new applications either enabled or made notably easier by a converged infrastructure.

Myth: Ultimately there is one right path to convergence.
Reality: There are multiple paths to convergence based on where the enterprise is starting and what is driving it. However, as will be discussed in section 4 of this paper, any path to convergence has to include deploying the capability to effectively manage the converged infrastructure.

Myth: Convergence is all about increasing the bandwidth.
Reality: Most corporations will not want to just throw bandwidth at the problem - at least not in the WAN. As a minimum, what will be needed is a way to allocate the bandwidth appropriately and effectively to ensure that certain applications such as voice receive low predictable latency.
2.0 Drivers of Convergence
Our industry has a long history of deploying technologies in search of a problem to solve. Hence, in order to determine the viability of convergence in general, and IP Telephony in particular, it is important to understand the degree to which a converged infrastructure adds business value. To accomplish this, the following lists some of the most common issues currently affecting businesses, a statement as to how each issue translates into a requirement of the IT organization, and a statement as to how convergence of applications, networks, and management helps the IT organization to meet this requirement.

Business Issue: Reduce the time it takes for a company to bring products and service to the marketplace.
Network Requirement: Reduce the time it takes for the IT organization to deploy new services or to extend existing services to new sites.
Impact of Convergence: It is easier and faster to deploy new services over a single robust infrastructure than over disparate infrastructures (see section 5).

Business Issue: Create tighter relationships with customers, suppliers, and distributors.
Network Requirement: Make it easier for customers, suppliers, and distributors to do business with the enterprise.
Impact of Convergence: It is now possible to provide a single interface to the customer for all types of interaction, while enhancing the experience by providing customer care applications that combine voice and data traffic.

Business Issue: Reduce operating costs.
Network Requirement: Reduce the unit cost of running a network.
Impact of Convergence: The people, transmission, and capital costs of a converged infrastructure are less than those of multiple disparate infrastructures (see section 5).

Business Issue: Attract and retain the best talent.
Network Requirement: Extend the network to homes and small offices.
Impact of Convergence: It is now possible to provide employees with one place to go for all of their communications; i.e., voice, fax, data.

Business Issue: Implement an eBusiness strategy.
Network Requirement: Increase the performance of certain applications.
Impact of Convergence: As discussed below, implementing Policy Management facilitates providing the performance that a given application needs while providing the remaining applications sufficient resources.

Business Issue: Improve productivity.
Network Requirement: Support applications such as white boarding and video conferencing.
Impact of Convergence: It is possible to deploy productivity tools that combine voice, data, and video, and via Policy Management ensure that these applications get the resources they need.

Business Issue: Increasing revenues.
Network Requirement: Support increasing traffic volumes.
Impact of Convergence: It is more efficient to support ever-increasing traffic on one relatively large network than on separate, relatively small networks (see section 5).

One of the first applications of a converged infrastructure is IP Telephony. Note that the author uses the term IP Telephony to mean providing voice service over an IP network in a manner such that the users of the service have virtually the same experience they would have had if the voice had been transported over a circuit switched network. In order to provide for IP Telephony, a converged network must be able to guarantee end-to-end delay of roughly 150 ms or less, and that the delay will not vary by more than 20 or 30 ms. However, in addition to providing low, predictable delay, the network must also provide the key features of a voice service that users have come to expect.

Focusing on IP Telephony, there are two key factors that typically drive an enterprise to deploy it. The first is cost savings. In particular, over time packet switching is becoming notably more cost-effective than circuit switching. This fact was documented in a 1997 article in Business Communications Review (BCR) written by Peter Sevcik of Northeast Consulting. What that BCR article shows is that packet switching will soon be between twenty and fifty times more cost-effective than circuit switching.

The second factor that drives enterprise users to IP Telephony is the ability to deploy new capabilities that improve user productivity. One such capability is the ability to browse Web pages from a phone. Underlying this capability is a technology referred to as VXML (Voice eXtensible Markup Language). VXML is somewhat similar to HTML. When a user calls a special phone number, the call is routed to a device called a voice response unit. This launches a Web browser, which finds and interprets a document written in VXML and then responds to the caller. Users can interact with the Web either by voice or touch-tone.
Other capabilities that convergence either enables or makes notably simpler include:

Virtual Call Centers
Due to a shortage of skilled labor, many corporations are forced to extend their call centers to where they can best hire agents. A converged network gives the corporation the ability to easily implement a virtual call center in which the network functions like the traditional call center switch.
Simplification of Routing Administration
Voice network routing table administration can be significantly simplified by integrating the voice network routing table with the distributed, autonomous routing intelligence inherent in packet-switched networks. The flexibility of IP networks can significantly simplify moves, adds, and changes within telephony networks.

Mobility
IP Networks offer the ability to associate names with users rather than with physical ports on the network. This offers the flexibility to use the same phone line for simultaneous voice mail, e-mail, and voice calling. This flexibility can also be used effectively to allow employees to travel and receive calls at their temporary locations.

Directory Integration
Data networks and voice networks have separate directories for their users. IP Telephony enables the integration of multiple directories into a single cohesive system. This eliminates both the labor and the errors associated with the replication of information. Vendors that leverage their customers' investments in corporate directories increase the productivity and viability of the overall system.

Policy Integration
Traditional telephony enables the specialized treatment of calls based on the user profile. Likewise, data networks have policies to control access to information and manage network resources. IP Telephony allows the integration of policies, based on a myriad of rules, across both telephony and data networks.

3.0 An Industry-Specific View
The previous section looked at some of the most common issues currently affecting businesses in general and discussed how a converged infrastructure would be of benefit. This section provides additional detail on three key industry segments: the medical, retail, and financial industries. The section will both describe the particular business pressures that are affecting those industries and identify the degree to which these pressures can benefit from a converged infrastructure.

3.1 The Medical Industry
The medical industry is undergoing a metamorphosis driven by a combination of marketplace pressures, government regulations, and consumer demand. The medical industry has moved from a time when physicians were in charge of medicine to one in which the HMOs are in charge. In order to be more responsive, some HMOs are trying to move to an environment in which patients are more in charge of their treatment. Another key characteristic of the medical industry is the ongoing mergers and acquisitions.

Because of these pressures, the IT organizations within the medical industry are typically driven to:
_      Rationalize the disparate networks that result from mergers and acquisitions;
_      Provide consistent and improved customer service; and
_      Implement enhanced security.

One of the particular factors driving the medical industry to need enhanced security is the recently enacted government regulations that require electronic signatures on any patient information that flows across a network. Medical organizations that do not comply with these regulations face stiff fines.
Given this environment, most IT organizations within the medical industry are not ready to make a major deployment of a converged network infrastructure. Rather, this is the time for these organizations to begin to harmonize their disparate networks to facilitate deploying a converged network infrastructure in the near term. However, this is a very appropriate time for these IT organizations to explore converged applications and enhanced network management. In particular, tele-health applications can improve the quality of health care while simultaneously reducing cost. The deployment of policy management (see section 4.1) can greatly increase the security within these networks.

3.2 The Retail Industry
The retail industry is characterized by needing to support a high volume of transactions, being very cost-sensitive, and needing to offer high levels of customer service. These industry characteristics translate into the need for a converged network infrastructure, converged applications, as well as for converged management. In particular, the retail industry has the following convergence requirements.

Wireless VoIP
Most large retailers are implementing wireless LANs and are moving towards 802.11 to support wireless scanning and computing devices. Many retailers would like to use a common wireless infrastructure to support wireless voice.

The use of a common wired infrastructure
Retailers today run many different network infrastructures in a store. To reduce operational costs, and potentially installation costs, it is highly desirable to use a common wired infrastructure in new retail stores. One advantage of Ethersets is that they would reduce the cost of moves, adds, and changes.
Another advantage of deploying Ethersets is that new functionality can be introduced to telephones through software upgrades on a server. For example, soft keys for calling the store manager, security, or building services can all be on the phone. The server can be programmed remotely to ensure that the phones will automatically use the correct numbers, even if they change often. In addition, the store directory can be available with one-button access.

Reduction in telephone costs in each store
By using VoIP for store-to-store, store-to-distribution center, and store-to-head office communication, retailers can potentially reduce long distance charges and reduce their requirements for outgoing lines and trunks.

Enable the delivery of new services
One such service is to enable a retailer to transfer a telephone call received in a customer care center to the appropriate store along with customer relationship information on the originating caller.

Support other real-time traffic
Most retailers want to move their Point of Sale (POS) traffic to a common IP network with the assurance that it will receive the highest priority and will always get through.

Enable the use of common management infrastructure
By moving to all IP-enabled devices, a remote common management infrastructure can be used. This tends to both reduce the cost and increase the quality.

3.3 The Financial Industry
The financial industry is undergoing a transformation due to factors such as globalization and continuing deregulation. At the same time this is happening, customers are becoming more sophisticated and demanding. This combination of factors is creating pricing pressures throughout the financial industry.
These industry trends translate into a variety of key business objectives for financial institutions. Financial institutions want the ability to:
_     Lower operating and transaction costs
_      Increase profitability per customer
_     Offer choice and convenience to customers
_      Understand the customer's whole needs
_      Provide trained resources that can engage with clients
_      Maintain/increase brand equity and extend trust
_      Implement a flexible operating environment to stay ahead of competition

These industry characteristics translate into the need for a converged network infrastructure, converged applications, as well as for converged management. For example, one of the strategies that financial institutions have implemented to respond to these business issues is to simplify and integrate both the traditional branch office and the various other customer touch points. Disparate networks, applications, and back-office systems make it very difficult to service those touch points in a cost-effective, efficient manner. As a point of reference, over 60 percent of a financial institution's IT costs are associated with maintaining legacy systems.

Another key strategy for financial institutions to implement is the migration to an IP environment, and to port applications to work in this environment. In this way, the financial institution can begin to enhance the customer experience via a Web interface as well as take advantage of the increasing number of Web-friendly and multimedia applications designed to operate over IP. This now positions the IT organization to bring voice and data together on the Web and tie in the customer relationship management center (Call Centers).  The financial institution can now package and process their voice calls and data records seamlessly.  For example, customer profile information and records need to travel securely from the customer contact center to any other point in the enterprise and be synchronized with the customer call. In this way the customer is managed and treated consistent without information needing to be repeated. In order to support this, an optimized IP network with high-performance QoS, reliability, and security is essential. This drives the requirement for converged management (see section 4.0).

4.0 The Role of Network Management
In a converged infrastructure, enhanced network management is both a requirement and an opportunity. It is a requirement because a converged infrastructure will require higher levels of reliability and security than legacy infrastructures do. In addition, a converged infrastructure will also require that the network be provisioned to provide low, predictable delay to those applications that are delay-sensitive. A converged infrastructure also presents the opportunity to provide enhanced network management. This opportunity is to manage the campus, the WAN, and the telephony network as a single system. As previously mentioned, deploying a converged infrastructure affords the enterprise IT organization the ability to perform better routing and equipment administration as well as integrate directories and policies across the enterprise.

Directory integration provides an effective solution to the disparate database debacle.  Specifically, directories have historically been application-specific. Hence, the IT infrastructure is littered with disparate directories for applications such as e-mail and remote access. Existing methodologies for both updating directories and keeping information consistent across them is both labor-intensive and error-prone. The goal is to migrate to a single, unified directory that integrates the disparate directories. This unified directory achieves this goal by adhering to a common schema and interfacing with a policy server (see below) that enforces a set of rules or policies.

4.1 Policy Management
Two key components of managing a converged infrastructure are policy management and service level management. The author uses the phrase "policy management" to refer to the ability to dynamically configure traffic flows based on user, application, or outside event. The need to configure traffic flows based on the user or application is an often-discussed topic. In particular, it is generally accepted that it is desirous to treat people and applications differently based on a variety of business criteria. However, the need to dynamically configure the network based on an outside event is discussed far less often. The issue here is that in many cases it is possible for an event that is external to the extended enterprise to significantly change the traffic flow requirements. For example, an uprising in some part of the world (i.e., Indonesia) would cause some of the users in companies such as brokerage firms and insurance companies to need quick access to a variety of news broadcasts.

As defined above, policy management has both a tactical and a strategic impact. On a tactical basis, policy management allows IT professionals to both automate and apply intelligence to configuring the IT infrastructure. This capability presents two significant advantages to the IT organization - reduced cost and higher availability. Policy management reduces cost by easing the amount of resources required to do configuration. Policy management increases availability due to the fact that an outage in the IT infrastructure is as likely to be caused by a configuration error as by a hardware error. As such, implementing intelligence-based processes for configuration management can eliminate configuration errors and the outages they cause. The strategic impact of policy management stems from its ability to enable the enforcement of a set of rules or policies that dictate access rights and use of resources to meet established business objectives. For example, IT organizations are increasingly being required to offer acceptable Quality of Service (QoS) to certain mission-critical applications while also meeting the needs of other applications and users in a cost-effective manner.

In general, the strategic impact of policy management comes from its ability to enable:
_      Directory Integration,
_      Quality of Service, and
_      Security.
end to end across the network. Policy Management consists of the building blocks shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1:         Policy Management Building Blocks.

As shown in Figure 2, during the last year enterprise IT organizations have become notably more interested in deploying Policy Management. In particular, Figure 2 shows the results of a survey that measured the interest in implementing Policy Management. This survey was administered in both 1998 and 1999. Note that in 1998, roughly half of the respondents were neutral about implementing Policy Management. However, in 1999, less than 30 percent of the respondents were neutral about implementing Policy Management. More importantly, the general trend was to shift away from being neutral to being interested in implementing Policy Management.

Figure 2:      Policy Management Survey.

However, exactly how Policy Management should be implemented is a topic that is debated in many forums, including a May 1999 article in Data Communications magazine entitled "The Policy Makers." As mentioned in the article, all policy-based schemes are comprised of three core components: a management console, one or more policy servers, and network hardware. The purpose of the management console is to set Quality of Service (QoS) policies, typically by assigning traffic to predefined service classes.  The policy server is responsible for telling the switches and routers how to handle different types of traffic in order to meet the specified QoS levels. The switches and routers use internal queuing mechanisms to enforce the policies and to mark the traffic so that other pieces of network equipment can do the same.

The Data Communications article also details the issues that enterprise IT organizations need to be aware of when evaluating a policy management solution. Those issues include:

Products vs. slideware
Many vendors have yet to ship any products that actually enable policy management.
Location of the Policy Server

In some implementations the policy server is embedded in the network equipment. In others, it is a stand-alone device.
Policy Server Architecture

Some vendors deploy a two-tier architecture in which a server manager is used to download policies to a policy server. Also, most vendors allow for the deployment of redundant policy servers.

4.2 Service Level Management (SLM)
As mentioned, the key components of managing a converged infrastructure are policy management and service level management. There are two reasons that would drive an IT organization to implement service level management. The first reason is to better link the goals of the IT organization with those of the business by clearly defining the services that the IT organization provides to the Business Units. The second reason is to provide a feedback mechanism for policy management.

To link the goals of the IT organization with those of the business, there needs to be various levels of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), both business and technology focused, and these need to relate to each other. For example, one set of services that an IT organization may offer to the enterprise is conferencing services. This could potentially include audio-conferencing, desktop video-conferencing, and room video-conferencing.  The service description for this set of services might include user-centric metrics such as availability and the cost of the service. However, these user-centric metrics need to be mapped to the service level provided by the underlying infrastructure. In addition, once the SLAs have been established, it is incumbent on the IT organization to deliver consistent and reliable network and application performance by monitoring the environment for its ability to meet the SLAs.

While there has been a great increase in terms of the number of IT organizations that offer formal SLAs to the Business Units, the percentage of such IT organizations is still less than half of the total.  However, few IT organizations work in an environment where there is no expectation on the level of service that the IT organization offers to the Business Units. Hence, virtually all IT organizations offer SLAs. The only question is whether the SLA is implicit or explicit and which is best for the IT organization and the business.

The principal reason that Service Level Management fails to be as impactful as it might be is that IT organizations do not deploy a structured approach. The author would like to suggest that the following are key components of a successful deployment of Service Level Management:

_      Service Screening and Planning
_      Service Design and Testing
_      Service Introduction
_      Ongoing Service Monitoring
_      Service Retirement

Some of the tasks listed above, such as service planning, requires a level of skill which is often missing from an IT organization. Hence, if an IT organization wants to be successful with service management, it needs to evolve the skill mix in the organization.

In addition to evolving the skills of the organization, new tools and agents are required. Nortel Networks recognizes this and it is the company's intention to improve the effectiveness of Service Level Management (SLM) via the use of Optivity SLM. Optivity SLM provides proactive planning, comprehensive trend analysis, and the establishment of performance baselines to strategically and effectively plan network growth and future enhancements. Optivity SLM enables IT professionals to gather and aggregate application performance and availability data directly from users. It does this via a variety of agents that are located at both local and remote desktops. Having agents at the desktops means that Optivity SLM can quantify the end-user experience for each network and application transaction. Optivity SLM currently supports more than 25 prepackaged applications including popular groupware, e-mail, Web, database, and business applications such as SAP R/3 and PeopleSoft. It is easy to monitor any custom application by entering the name of the application and the relevant TCP socket. It is also possible to enter a range of ports necessary for certain categories of applications, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications.

5.0 The Converged WAN
There are a variety of ways that an enterprise can benefit from a converged WAN infrastructure. For example, many companies can save money by deploying converged WAN access. By converged WAN access is meant the dynamic combination of voice, video, and data traffic onto a single transmission group from an enterprise location to the carrier's Point of Presence (POP). To understand how converged WAN access can help to reduce costs, consider a company that has 200 branch offices with multiple T1s from each branch office to the carrier's POP. Assume that the average monthly cost of these T1s is $500 and they are statically configured to carry voice, SNA, and IP traffic. Further assume that by deploying Inverse Multiplexing over ATM (IMA) the enterprise reduces one T1 per office. This results in a $100K monthly savings, or $3.6 million over a three-year life cycle. If within that company, every dollar of revenue results in 10 cents flowing to the bottom line, then this $3.6 million savings has the same impact on the company's bottom line as $36 million in new revenue.
A converged WAN backbone can help an enterprise to both save money and better compete in the marketplace. Nortel Networks is a good example of a company that has achieved these two goals by deploying an ATM wide area network to carry voice, data, and video traffic. Five years ago, Nortel Networks had seven separate but overlapping networks serving the voice, data, fax, and video needs of roughly 60,000 users in both Nortel Networks and Bell Northern Research locations worldwide. At the core of these networks were a multitude of TDM devices supporting relatively low-speed lines; i.e., a Fractional T1 up to a couple of T1s. The predominant user of bandwidth at the time was voice traffic.
Two of the goals that Nortel Networks had when they deployed their converged WAN backbone were:

_     To provide increased bandwidth to meet the explosive growth in network traffic, while facilitating the deployment of emerging bandwidth-intensive business applications

_     To consolidate the corporation's existing enterprise networks into a single WAN as a means of trimming costs and simplifying network management
The network that Nortel Networks deployed in the U.S. was based on carrier-provided ATM services running at DS-3 speeds. The network also had private T3s between the U.S. and Canada, as well as between Ottawa and Toronto. The original business case for this network focused on combining multiple data networks onto a common WAN. However, the business case that was accepted by Nortel Networks senior management called for combining Nortel Networks' voice traffic with its data traffic. By combining the voice and data traffic onto a common WAN, the payback period for this network was just over a year. Part of the reason that Nortel Networks was able to achieve such a quick payback was that it combined standard voice compression techniques with speech activity detection, which eliminates the pauses in conversations. The result was a significant reduction in the transmission capacity required for the voice traffic.

During the last five years, Nortel Networks' converged WAN has facilitated both great growth and changing business models. For example, in that timeframe, the voice traffic on the Nortel Networks backbone has nearly doubled. However, at the same time, the data traffic on the backbone has doubled three times! While it most likely would have been possible to support this traffic using TDM and private lines, it would have been much more expensive. In addition, as recently as three or four years ago, it was still taking Nortel Networks sixty to ninety days to get an additional T1 installed. That would have made it difficult if not impossible for Nortel Networks to support rapidly escalating traffic demands in a timely manner with the old network structure. However, with their ATM backbone, adding bandwidth can be done quickly in software.

In part because of the lower cost structure of this WAN backbone, Nortel Networks has been able to deploy new applications that facilitate new ways of doing business. For example, Nortel Networks currently has roughly 1.5 million Web pages spread over 1,300 Web servers. Now when Nortel Networks announces a product or a product enhancement, the sales force can pull down the appropriate Web page immediately. In part because of these successes, the network now has been expanded. There are now links between North America and the UK as well as between the UK and the continent of Europe. In addition, there is an ATM WAN within the UK as well as across Europe.

6.0 Summary and Next Steps
As we enter the new millennium, the competitive pressures on businesses will only increase. In addition, over the next several years, the success or failure of a business will increasingly be linked to the success or failure of the IT organization. Given these pressures, it is critical that the IT organization expand their efforts to align the goals of the IT organization with those of the business. Sections 2 and 3 of this paper gave some insight as to how to make that alignment. In particular, the IT organization needs to be able to articulate the primary issues driving the business. Then for each issue, it must then identify how the use of IT can alleviate that issue.

What is so appealing about the deployment of a converged infrastructure is that the benefits it offers match up so well with the most common issues that currently impact business.

Organizations looking to deploy a converged infrastructure would be well advised to:

_      Crisply identify what business situation or situations would benefit from a converged infrastructure. Note that the phrase "business situation" could refer to an issue faced by the enterprise; i.e., establishing better linkage with customers. Or, it could refer to the business of IT, i.e., improve configuration management by deploying Policy Management.

_     Define which component or components of convergence is the most appropriate. In particular, analyze if converged WAN access can be beneficial.

_      Provide a solution that will meet the expectations not just of performance but also of functionality, if IP Telephony is intended to be part of the convergence solution.

_     Deploy the infrastructure now that can support Policy Management and Service Management, even if deployment of this functionality is not intended in the near term.

_     Define the services that IT offers to the enterprise. For each service, list a few key performance and economic parameters.
_      Implement the structure to begin to market the services provided by IT to the enterprise.

_      Develop and implement a plan to ensure that the skills exist within the organization to interface with the Business Units on a more strategic basis as well as to implement and manage the new technologies.

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