HP Introduces New Consulting Services To Bring UC Into The Enterprise

On Monday HP unveiled three new consulting services to hasten the introduction of unified communications (UC) technology into the enterprise. The services focus on delivering multiple voice communication systems; accommodating the modern workplace, where employees work remotely and from multiple locations; and making sure the network has the capacity to deliver UC, particularly videoconferencing.

HP also announced partnerships with several UC vendors, although noticeable by its absence from the list is Cisco Systems, now HP’s top rival in networking as well as in the UC space.

Unified communications is a term for bringing together different forms of workplace communications, such as land-line voice, voice over IP (VoIP), mobile, email, instant messaging, videoconferencing and document sharing. It is a growing enterprise market as companies try to accommodate teleworkers, people who work from the road and teams working from multiple locations collaborating on the same project.

The first of HP's UC consulting services is HP Voice Transformation Solutions, which seeks to integrate traditional land-line phone service with VoIP technology, in which calls go over the Internet. The integration technology is known as SIP (for session initiation protocol) trunking. Unified voice is a foundational technology for unified communications, says David Cook, strategy and operations lead of the Global UC Portfolio in the Technology Consulting business unit of HP.

The second consulting offering is HP Virtual Workplace Solutions, which helps companies organize and accommodate all the ways that the workplace has changed in recent years, such as employees working in multiple locations and bringing their own personal devices, such as smartphones and tablet computers, into the workplace. It also addresses the habits of "millennials," people entering the workforce for the first time in the 21st century who are familiar with using videoconferencing and social media in their jobs, Cook says.

"[We] bring all that together in an approach to enable a customer to achieve the UC benefits with all of those drivers," he says.Third on HP's list of new consulting services is HP Network Readiness Services for UC, which advises customers on whether they need to upgrade their network capacity. Videoconferencing uses considerably more network bandwidth than data or voice, and also comes with strong quality of service (QoS) requirements so that the video looks right.

HP's partnerships are with Microsoft, whose Lync suite is a widely used software platform for UC; Polycom, a maker of videoconference systems; and Alcatel-Lucent and Avaya, both telecom network equipment vendors. Polycom recently introduced a videoconference system with Lync built in. HP had been a partner in implementing Cisco UC solutions in the past, but no longer does since Cisco is an HP competitor in UC as well as in networking, says Cook. The rivalry between HP and Cisco has recently become testy.

The HP consulting services emphasize interoperability, he says, based on the fact that most IT organizations combine technology from different vendors. The consulting is designed to make sure all those different products work together. HP cites 2010 research from Gartner saying that, by 2015, 60% of organizations will offer employees at least four parallel and overlapping voice/telephony options.

"What we’re saying is that, based upon that Gartner piece, these issues of multivendor integration and interoperability are going to be around for a while, so we’re embracing that in the consulting services that we have," Cook says.

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