MCI MOVES IN NEW DIRECTION ON ENTERPRISE VOICE SERVICES

MCI and Microsoft announced a deal last week that on its surface appears to be a simple collaboration on Web conferencing, but ultimately provides a strong indication of how the carrier will view enterprise voice services over the next several years.

The marketing agreement, which extends an existing relationship between the two companies, combines Microsoft Office Live Meeting with MCI's Net Conferencing services. The new service set, which will be marketed to all of the carrier's business segments, also establishes Microsoft and MCI as preferred partners in future collaborations including Web conferencing services. Going forward, MCI also will work closely with Microsoft on integrating voice into the enterprise desktop, said Michael Capellas, president and CEO of MCI, during a press briefing at Networld+Interop last week in Las Vegas.

“What you'll see added to it is complete integration with telephony at the desktop,” he said, noting that Microsoft already has committed to completely support voice services in its next operating system. “The industry is going through one of those shifts that you only get five or six times. Over the next 12 months, we're going to see a fundamental structural shift.”

MCI's vision is to treat voice as just another application on its IP network and not necessarily as a separate service. To some extent, Net Conferencing users already have that perspective. As part of the agreement with Microsoft, users can collaborate using applications such as shared white boarding and instant video conferencing over the carrier's network. All applications also can be populated with contact lists that are pulled from an Outlook address book.

“On some level we have it integrated today from the user perspective, but not from the network,” said Neal Lulofs, senior marketing manager for conferencing at MCI.

Getting to the point, though, in which carrier networks can accept voice as just another service will take time, if only because service providers are still wrestling with the shifts in enterprise networks that are rapidly adopting that philosophy themselves. Additionally, given the preponderance of their revenue that still comes from traditional voice services, carriers aren't going to rush that viewpoint.

“Most of the time that I'm talking to [CEOs and CTOs] in carriers, I'm educating them on what's happening with the enterprise network,” said Andy Mattes, president and CEO of Siemens Information and Communication Networks.

Mattes, who came out of the enterprise group of ICN, said voice may indeed end up as an application on IP networks, but there are some fundamental issues such as billing models that must be solved.

“As a carrier, you have to get out of the bandwidth provisioning pricing model and into a transaction-based pricing model,” he said.

Also, most carriers won't make the move to a truly converged network until they are ready to deploy what he calls “voice-plus” services. In MCI's view, presence and availability management, and integration with wireless devices are among the “plus” parts of that equation.

“We're working with the next generation of presence technology to give a more contextual base to it,” Lulofs said.

Large enterprises already are making the jump, combining presence availability management, desktop voice and wireless in campus environments. Carriers will bring that integration out to wide-area environments very soon with wireless playing a more significant role, said Sameer Padhye, vice president of worldwide service provider marketing for Cisco Systems.

“Within two to three years, we'll be talking in completely different terms about voice because of the integration of wireline and wireless,” he said.