Hosted Voice to Cloud En

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Polycom and BroadSot Help Service

Providers Move rom Hosted Voice to

Cloud-Based Unied Communication

ServicesDecember 2010

A POLYCOM WHITEPAPER



Executive SummaryOn November 8, 2010, Polycom and BroadSot announced theextension o their relationship and the creation o the BroadCloud™

video-enabled unied communications (UC) cloud solution thatwill allow service providers to lower the cost and complexity o

deploying and using business-to-business (B2B) telepresence and

high-denition (HD) voice solutions or organizations around theglobe.

The solution will drive market growth through the rapid adoption

o UC, and will give customers end-to-end HD voice andvideo communications capabilities, open interoperability with

other standards-based UC systems, and B2B telepresenceapplications.

This cloud oering is designed to help service providers cost-eectively extend their hosted telephony services to address the

global, hyper-growth market or hosted and managed UC services,projected to reach approximately $6.2 billion by 2014.1 Since small

and medium businesses (SMBs) benet the most rom hostedcommunications services, it is expected that the new BroadCloudvideo service will dramatically increase video adoption in the SMB

market segment.

This paper describes how the collaboration between Polycomand BroadSot will help service providers move rom hosted voice

services to much richer unied communications services leveragingthe Cloud.2

IntroductionPolycom is a leader in voice and video communications and hasestablished itsel as a major player in the UC space through

Polycom Open Collaboration Network partners that includesmajor players in the UC market. BroadSot—a key PolycomOpen Collaboration Network partner—is a leader in hosted voice

communication services, and its BroadWorks™ platorm has beendeployed by more than 150 service providers worldwide.

Polycom and BroadSot have partnered since 2002 to makehosted Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) a commercial success.

While BroadSot ocuses on advanced call eatures and carrier-grade scalability and reliability, Polycom delivers premium voice

quality, a complete endpoint portolio that addresses the needs oSMB and enterprises, and an intuitive user interace. This winning

combination overcame critical issues in initial VoIP deploymentsand has led to numerous successul mass deployments in recentyears.

With video quickly becoming a requirement or business

communication, Polycom and BroadSot are expanding theirrelationship to enable cloud-based UC services, including hosted

video services.

What Business WantsBusinesses are looking or ways to reduce communicationcosts and to escape the ast technological obsolescence o

on-premise equipment. ‘Pay only or what you use’ is a veryattractive proposition, especially or SMBs that do not have large

IT departments to support on-premise systems, whether voice

or video. Larger organizations, or example in education andgovernment, also oten preer hosted services or their fexibility.

Consumer grade services such as Skype are sometimes used, but

in SMB environments they do not provide the quality required andlimit the options or accessing audio and video services to a single

“sot client” with inconsistent support. Like enterprises, SMBsrequire a broad range o access options, including conerence

phones, oce phones, sot clients, business media phones, videoendpoints and so on, to address the needs or personal and groupcommunications. Service providers should be able to support a wide

variety o endpoints to meet these requirements.

In addition to voice and video services, businesses need accessto presence, instant messaging, and directory services that areintrinsic part o UC. Businesses are accustomed to the seamless

connectivity that the combination o VoIP, SIP trunking and thePublic Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) provide. They expect

UC services—video, instant messaging, and presence—to worknot only within the organization ( intra-company) but also across

organizations (inter-company or B2B).

Finally, businesses are oten overwhelmed by the complexity o UC

integrations and are looking or a way to simpliy UC deploymentswhile keeping the cost low and predictable.

Hosted Voice Communication ServicesHosted voice communication technology has made spectacularadvances over the last decade, while the business models in the

space have matured and are now well established in the industry.To control cost, service providers use “multi-tenant” unctionality

in service provider-grade equipment. This allows multipleorganizations to leverage a common, robust service provider

inrastructure while keeping their communications completelyindependent rom one another. Serving numerous customers withthe same pool o resources allows or economies o scale that

are not possible in on-premise deployments. Service providerscan thereore oer better and more predictable service costs to

customers.

Since the inrastructure components are hosted by the service

provider, a customer only needs to purchase or lease the on-premise equipment, not the entire inrastructure. This dramatically

reduces the initial deployment cost. To control the cost o managingthe on-premise equipment and avoid the dreaded “truck roll,”

service providers deploy auto-provisioning technology. Zero TouchProvisioning, or ZTP, is the latest iteration o this.

A POLYCOM WHITEPAPER Polycom and BroadSot Help Service Providers Move rom Hosted Voice to Cloud-Based Unied Communication Services

2



Figure 1 depicts a typical hosted voice conguration, in this

example using the BroadSot/Polycom solution.

Hosted solutions based on BroadSot and Polycom equipmentprovide exceptional investment protection or both ServiceProviders and their business customers. BroadWorks is entirely

based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), a stable and maturestandard now widely adopted in VoIP applications. Polycom

endpoints, which also implement the SIP protocol, are not onlyvery reliable and easy to use but also extremely easy to integrate,

deploy, and manage. These endpoints also support leading-edge

technologies such as minimum touch provisioning, VLAN discovery,and voice quality metrics monitoring. Seamless integration with

the BroadWorks platorm has grown rom the close collaborationbetween Polycom and BroadSot in the standardization process,

and rom continuous interoperability tests over years.

BroadSoft BroadWorks

The BroadWorks platorm includes application servers, networkservers, and voice conerencing servers that allow the building o

scalable networks. While a single application server can supportaround 50,000 users (or “subscribers,” in SP terminology), a

network o servers on the BroadWorks platorm can scale to 20million users. Gateways assure connectivity to other networks, such

as PSTN, while the SIP Connect specication—adopted by the SIPForum3 as a basis or SIP trunking interoperability—allows replacingthe traditional T1 links between businesses and service providers

with an IP connection.

The application server provides call control, and allows or

conguration o user proles—either individually or in groups.While this can be managed through an intuitive Web user interace,

most service providers rely on BroadWorks’ built-in import andbatch capabilities to easily and accurately create large user groups

leveraging the inormation in their existing subscriber database.This application server uses the available conguration o user

inormation to create individual conguration les or the devicesand clients assigned to each user. The conguration les can then

be stored on the application server or—in scalable deployments—on a separate provisioning server, thus enabling very large numberso Polycom endpoints to retrieve conguration inormation upon

startup and when conguration changes occur.

The voice conerencing server allows eatures such as multipointvoice conerencing to be activated by the BroadWorks user with

a single click. The conerencing server connects multiple voicemedia streams, collects DTMF input via a built-in Interactive VoiceResponse (IVR) unction, provides this input to the application

server or processing, and then executes commands rom theapplication server. It thereore behaves as a typical media server, as

dened in the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and other modernservice provider architectures.

Polycom Endpoints

Polycom provides an unparalleled range o endpoints orBroadWorks-based hosted communication services, enablingextraordinary interoperability among environments that range rom

personal audio devices to room-scale HD video conerencing withHD voice. The Polycom endpoint portolio today includes Polycom® SoundPoint® IP desktop phones and Polycom SoundStation®

conerence phones, as well as Polycom KIRK® DECT wirelesshandsets that can easily connect to BroadWorks through the KIRK

Wireless Servers 300 and 6000. The Polycom portolio has recentlybeen extended to include video-capable devices such as the

Polycom VVX® 1500 business media phone, and the entire amilyo Polycom HDX® video endpoints. Further wireless and videocapable endpoints will be added in 2011.

Polycom endpoints deliver industry leading innovations, such as

the latest advances in HD voice technology with patented PolycomAcoustic Clarity™ technology II, in one powerul package. Polycomremains a leader in developing advanced codecs to reliably deliver

high-quality media over diverse channels. Since creating the open-standard G.722.1 and G.722.1 Annex C (Siren7, Siren14) HD voice

codecs and making them available royalty-ree, Polycom has co-developed the G.719 ull-band 20kHz codec, and supports these

and a variety o other codecs to ensure maximum interoperabilitywith BroadSot.

Advanced Polycom-BroadSot InteroperabilityInteroperability between Polycom and BroadSot has evolvedover time and now includes all areas rom call control to endpoint

provisioning. Polycom endpoints authenticate and register withBroadWorks servers. They leverage the SIP protocol to placeand receive calls as well as to activate a long list o telephony

eatures, such as hold, transer, orward, conerence, and multipleline appearance. Through the advance call control unctionality in

BroadWorks, users can leverage BroadSot’s sot client to controlunctions on the Polycom endpoint.


3

Figure 1: Hosted voice communication services using BroadSoft and

Polycom equipment



When Polycom endpoints on BroadWorks connect directly, theusers enjoy all benets o HD voice. BroadSot is working to enable

HD voice on its voice conerencing server, so that HD voice can beused in multipoint voice calls.

Polycom endpoints support advanced application developmentthrough Application Programming Interaces (APIs) or partner

developers. BroadWorks also has APIs that allow or customizationo the user interace. Service providers or other BroadSot

and Polycom partners can use the endpoint and sot clientcustomization options to create unique user interaces or theircustomers and users. Examples o such applications are account

billing codes, integrated dialers, and paging/alerts, as well asintegrations with Salesorce.com, Microsot® Outlook®, and IBM®

Lotus® Sametime® solutions.

Both BroadWorks and Polycom endpoints support an advanced,secure provisioning mechanism based on XML and HTTPS.Conguration data or the endpoints is automatically generated

in XML ormat when a new user account is created. Once the

Polycom endpoint comes on line, it uses the secure HTTPSprotocol to contact BroadWorks and to download its uniqueconguration le. The provisioning mechanism also allows or quick

updates o conguration les, and automatic distribution o updatedprovisioning inormation to thousands and potentially millions oPolycom endpoints in the network.

As a result o this seamless integration between Polycom endpoints

and the BroadWorks platorm the number o support calls is held toa minimum, which leads to lower operational cost or hosted voiceservice providers.

The New Competitive Environment orService ProvidersWith more than 500 million users around the globe, Skype hasemerged as a new kind o a service provider that oers ree IP-

to-IP calls and low rates on international calls. Google has alsoentered the market with Google Voice and promises to urther

lower the cost o regular telephony. Both Skype and Google areshiting ocus to business customers, with Skype recently hiring

Tony Bates rom Cisco (whose background is inbusiness applications) as their new CEO.

Both Skype and Google services are cloud-based and rely on thestrategic advantages that cloud implementations have in terms

o scale, reliability, and—some even say—security, although thislast advantage is debatable. These companies are driving voice to

become a commodity and a utility.

Service providers thereore need to take their services or

enterprises and SMB to the next level by oering business-qualityvideo, instant messaging, presence, and other UC services—in

addition to voice. Service provides also have to leverage cloud-based architectures or urther gains in the areas o scalability,reliability, and accessibility.

From Hosted Voice to Cloud-Based UCServicesService providers are a powerul ally to UC vendors in their eortto roll out UC services across enterprises and SMBs. They have

experience developing new services, testing and hardening them,and then rolling them out to large numbers o customers.

At the BroadSot Connections conerence in October 2010,BroadSot announced the new BroadCloud™ services4 including

instant messaging, presence, video, and Web conerencing.This announcement marks an important milestone towards

oering video service that service providers can resell. Polycomis BroadSot’s technology partner in the video services area, and

Polycom RMX 4000 conerencing server(s) are at the core o theBroadCloud oering.

While voice service providers have been looking or ways to addvideo to their oering, the cost o the video inrastructure has

been a major obstacle and barrier to entry. With BroadCloud,

service providers who have BroadWorks systems in operation cancongure them to access multipoint video services in the cloud,thus eliminating equipment investment. Figure 2 depicts such aconguration.


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Figure 2: Multi-point video services through the BroadCloud



The BroadCloud service enables advanced video communicationunctionality embedded in Polycom VVX and HDX endpoints.

Entering a multipoint conerence call is as simple as dialing anumber congured on BroadWorks. Multipoint conerencing

allows or screen layout control and continuous presence, whileBroadCloud also enables Polycom-exclusive technologies, suchas H.264 High Prole5 technology that allows service providers

to save precious bandwidth on the interace between customerpremise and service provider’s data center. An H.264 High Prole

implementation can save up to 50 percent on network bandwidth(compared to common H.264 Baseline Prole implementations),

and is now supported by Polycom HDX endpoints as well as by thePolycom RMX® conerencing servers deployed in the BroadCloud.

Note that the customers in Figure 2 may be small, medium, or largeenterprises. They may access video services independently, and

use Uniorm Resource Identier (URI) dialing to reach “o-net”destinations outside the organization. Another option or B2Bcommunication is through one o the emerging telepresence

exchanges that maintains connectivity and dialing inormation andacilitate calls across organizations. The exchange unction is not in

the scope o the BroadCloud today.

BroadCloud users who have Polycom endpoints will also enjoyHD voice and HD video capabilities. For example, HDX to HDXconnections over the BroadCloud will result in the highest audio

quality (here, the preerred codec is G.719 or transparent 20kHzsound in both voice and music) and the highest video quality (up to

HD1080p using H.264 High Prole technology).

ConclusionPolycom and BroadSot continue to expand their partnership to

help service providers evolve their hosted voice services to cloud-based UC services required to compete in new markets. The long-

standing partnership that started back in 2002 and made hostedVoIP a reality is now leveraged by the two companies together to

deliver video services to a wider customer base.

Cloud services are a disruptive technology that will increase

competition as regional service providers ace new competitorssuch as Skype and Google.

The trend toward cloud services is having a powerul impact onvoice and video communications and requires new business models

and innovative communication technology. Cloud services call

or reducing complexity in video inrastructure, so that scalableand inexpensive video networks can be built by service providers.Polycom recognizes these challenges, and is leading the market

in its announced plans to develop new technologies6 and throughopenly sharing a detailed understanding o their benets.7

About the AuthorStean Karapetkov is Emerging Technologies Director at Polycom,Inc. where he ocuses on the visual communications market

and technology. He has MBA rom Santa Clara University(USA) and an MS degree in Engineering rom the University o

Chemnitz (Germany). He has spent more than 15 years in product

management, new technology development, and product denition.His blog is http://videonetworker.blogspot.com/.

AcknowledgementsI would like to thank my colleagues Je Rodman, Peter Huboi, and

Joan Bentsen as well as John Proctor and Joseph Harsch romBroadSot or their contribution to this work.

Reerences1 Wainhouse Research, 2010 Worldwide Hosted/Managed UniedCommunications Services Forecast

2 Blog post “Voice and Video Collaboration Services in the Cloud”http://videonetworker.blogspot.com/2010/09/voice-and-video-collaboration-services_01.html

3 SIP Forum http://www.siporum.org

4 BroadSot press release http://www.broadsot.com/news/2010/

broadsot-introduces-broadcloud/

5 Polycom white paper “H.264 High Prole: The Next Big Thingin Visual Communications” http://www.polycom.com/global/

documents/whitepapers/h264_high_prole_wp.pd

6 Press release http://www.polycom.com/company/news_room/

press_releases/2010/20101108_2.html

7 Polycom white paper “More Scale At Lower Cost with Scalable

Video Coding” http://www.polycom.com/global/documents/whitepapers/more-scale-lower-cost-scalable-video-coding-wp.pd


Polycom Worldwide Headquarters

4750 Willow Road, Pleasanton, CA 945881.800.POLYCOM or +1.925.924.6000www.polycom.com

© 2010 Polycom, Inc. A ll rights reserved. POLYCOM ®, the Polycom “Triangles” logo and the names and marks associated with Polycom’s products are trademarks and/or service marks of Polycom, Inc. and areregistered and/or common law marks in the United States and various other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. No portion hereof may be reproduced or transmitted in any formor by any means, for any purpose other than the recipient’s personal use, without the express written permission of Polycom.

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