Cisco is reaffirming its focus on voice markets by strengthening its relationships with other vendors, new products and improved channel strategies. But while the company has a clear vision of how it would like the market to look, that market remains, for the time being, a long-term rather than immediate outlook.
Speaking to analysts and press in London yesterday, Cisco`s EMEA president Robert Lloyd described the ultimate goal as providing the type of universal access we expect from data, applied to a voice world, with devices and applications seamlessly meshed.
This isn`t going to happen tomorrow, but the interim steps offer benefits of their own. Lloyd described "waves of technology", each with its own advantages. E-commerce, for example, is an early wave that most companies have experienced to some degree. Integrated procurement and supply chain management is a more advanced wave, one that is much less pervasive. Lloyd puts voice over IP (VOIP) and related services into the latter category - on the corporate radar, but still very much a leading-edge field.
The completion of each wave typically involves IT expense and then savings and business benefits - Cisco is hoping to pitch voice applications as no different in this regard. Its strategy is three-fold, targeting service providers, large enterprises and (to a lesser extent), mid-sized companies.
VOIP channel
The technology itself is stable and very nearly mature. MPLS is shipping and delivering the promised boon to traffic management and service provision, voice standards really are standards at last (even at Cisco), and interoperability is fast approaching the taken-for-granted stage.
What is lacking is a clear understanding of the benefits beyond the cash-in-hand telecom operational costs, and widespread support from service providers, never mind regulatory bodies and governments. Several European markets (such as Switzerland, Spain and Italy to name just a few) are making great strides in making the IP voice market more widely appealing.
Consequently, Cisco is refocusing its efforts on new targets, shoring up a VOIP channel and training strategy that had been criticised as shallow, and starting to forge stronger relationships with potential partners to ensure that future evolutions of the market are closely tied to its apron strings.
In its portfolio of VOIP reference sites is a growing number of carriers and voice service providers, several of which offer services only if the customer uses Cisco equipment. What price interoperability? Here in London, Cisco trotted out BIS, a VPN provider with big plans for offering IP voice network services, with that Cisco dependency clear from the outset. Another might have been US-based Dialpad, currently under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Glen Maule, COO of BIS, offered no compelling reason for this devotion to Cisco, but the vendor`s delight is thinly veiled. The sale of 4000-series routers to BIS customers is nothing to shout about, but the foot in the door of another enterprise account is very different.
Missing interconnection pieces
Cisco`s training and channel strategies have also been realigned, allowing much clearer specialisation of roles, recognising the complexity of the converged-network marketplace. This, Cisco hopes, will help customers and partners more rapidly get to grips with what is still a very complex field. While the final vision is a grand one, it is still far from realisation. In truth, legacy environments dominate infrastructure and voice spending, and will continue to do so in the next several years. IP systems are a growing segment, but there are pieces missing. One such piece is a seamless interconnection environment between carriers and enterprises. IP voice is achieved today much as it was years ago; with gateways, protocol conversions, and complicated traffic and route management.
A possible solution is in metropolitan Ethernet networks, turning corporate LANs into extensions of an underlying service provider Ethernet network. Voice in such an environment really is just another application on the network, and many of the hurdles (for the SP, the enterprises and even the vendors) would drop away.
Looking locally, SA`s lag in broadband availability may turn into an entire missed generation as metro Ethernet rolls out in other regions. The appeal of converged metro network services to any putative telecom operator, from a VPN add-on to a core service for a second network operator, is obvious. Unsurprisingly, Ethernet and broadband is a very important space for Cisco going forward, Lloyd said.
He summed up Cisco`s vision neatly, saying voice should be "just another application, managed and provisioned on the network no different from any other". Taking that step may bring the finishing line into focus, but the service providers and enterprise customers have a few laps yet to run.
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