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Ericsson’s IMS solution for enterprise — The vehicle for collaboration

Ericsson Review, no. 02, 2005

Written by: Ingemar Lindblad and Johny Nyman

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Looking ahead three to five years, the market for enterprise communication solutions will see voice communication systems replaced by systems that support simultaneous multimedia communication and collaboration tools. These new systems will also integrate well into other parts of the enterprise IT environment.

The objective is not to place a call to a particular extension but to a person. The role one has and the task at hand should guide the communication system to take appropriate actions without the need for user intervention.

Through the evolution of its IMS solution, Ericsson is prepared to take this new, real-time collaboration one step further, by making it mobile. Ericsson's strategy extends to every user at every level of the enterprise.

The enabler of this evolution is the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), the architecture of choice for creating advanced network-based multimedia communication services for enterprise environments. IMS offers a framework for building services and delivering them with quality of service, security and interoperability.

The authors describe the architecture of the IMS enterprise communication solution, walking the reader through the logical architecture and explaining how services are to be supplied. They also describe deployment, and touch on how legacy PBX systems and mobile networks can be integrated with IMS.

Taking enterprise communications forward
Traditionally speaking, the PBX is a cornerstone of the enterprise communications infrastructure. Today, however, it no longer holds the most prominent role in this context. Indeed, nowadays some enterprises  stand to lose much more when their mail servers or the intranet is down than when the PBX fails them. Even so, high availability is a trademark of business class telephony, as are the numerous supplementary end-user services which ensure that calls always reach their intended destination.

Despite its new role, the PBX has never been more complex nor been asked to do as much in the enterprise environment as it does today. For instance, the linking of telephony and messaging in unified messaging systems gives end users access to voice and messaging services at the same time. Likewise, the use of PC clients or web applications for managing calls and giving end users access to corporate directories facilitates number lookup and call handling. And the functionality in personal information manager (PIM) systems helps end users and switchboards to control call flows, for example, by diverting calls to voice mail systems when end users are unavailable.

When out of office, end users want to be able to manage their communication tasks via their home phone, a PC or mobile device. The use of phones and clients with advanced functions and features must thus extend beyond the office environment, giving end users the ability to be available at any time, from any location, and in principle, via any device.

When first introduced in the mid-1990s, the main appeal of voice over IP (VoIP) was lower costs (on WAN links), not the introduction of a killer end-user application. By using the same infrastructure for voice and data, VoIP promised to significantly lower enterprise costs. In addition, it had the potential to bring about true unified communications by merging parallel telephony, messaging and video services into a single, homogeneous, multimedia communications service.

Today, a typical configuration of a conventional (IP)PBX involves a multitude of systems and servers that use different operating systems, different software architectures and different languages. The introduction of the session initiation protocol (SIP) marks an important step toward the convergence of voice and data. Besides allowing the convergence to take place in the lower layers of the infrastructure, it facilitates using the same client and device in a true multisession multimedia services mode (Figure 1).

Several vendors are gradually breaking into the enterprise communications segment where telephony is only one of numerous communication elements. Some of these vendors already have a large footprint in the enterprise market and the financial muscle to back up the introduction of new technology, such as real-time collaboration (RTC) solutions.

Obviously, compared with voice-only solutions, new collaborative tools give end users a significantly improved level of efficiency. Ensuing steps will be taken to match this new capability with, or fit it into, the IT ways of deploying and operating enterprise communications, and to extend the scope even further to make enterprise communication mobile.

On the one hand, a great many business and operations applications are very specific and must be tailored to fit the needs of the enterprise. On the other hand, to interwork, the systems and applications must adhere to common IT standards. They should also be part of the architectural strategy of the enterprise (enterprise architecture). Therefore, to ensure interoperability and to avoid costly and bulky systems, the industry has no choice but to adopt a more open approach. As a consequence, we are seeing a shift in emphasis toward

  • service-oriented architectures (SOA), which offer a way of integrating loosely coupled enterprise applications in a standard fashion; and
  • ervice-oriented business applications (SOBA), which are web-based services that employ the simple object access protocol (SOAP) and web services description language (WSDL) to carry out integrations.

When built properly, the solutions are based on systems that contain several atomic services - that is, services that can be deployed to meet the needs of any particular end user or group of end users. A prerequisite is an efficient service creation environment (SCE) for IT managers, their partners, service providers, and to some extent, end users.

We are standing at the brink of a new era of solutions that support business communication. The new solutions will easily adapt to group and individual's needs and be relatively easy to develop, deploy and operate.

In mobile scenarios one must constantly keep track of the location of mobile devices. In this context, SIP-based peer-to-peer communication does not do the whole job. The enabler of mobile enterprise communications is the IP Multimedia Subsystem. That is, to realize true, mobile, end-to-end services, the solutions must fit into the service provider's IMS architecture. In addition, the systems for IP telephony, SIP-based multimedia and isochronous communications must all be built to adhere to the same standards as apply to all other enterprise communications and business applications. In short, an IMS solution that fully supports the needs of an enterprise must employ public and enterprise standards.

Looking ahead three to five years, the market for enterprise communication solutions will see voice communication systems replaced by systems that support simultaneous multimedia communication (voice, video, messaging, text and graphics) and collaboration tools (document sharing, whiteboard, chat rooms and so on). These new systems will also integrate well into other parts of the enterprise IT environment (document storage, management tools, directories, and business applications). Through the evolution of its IMS solution, Ericsson is prepared to take this new, real-time collaboration one step further, by making it mobile.