PEERING
FEDERATING
Easing the Transition to an
‘All-IP’ World
Service providers peer in order to exchange traffic. Enterprises and organizations federate in order to enable secure communications. Both developments embrace wireline, cellular, VoIP, and IMS networks. by Bob Emmerson
Peering and federating can be confusing, so let’s start with a baseline service–IM. Secure IM is a great federation service and the easiest way to ensure security comes via a hosted service. Hosting eliminates the need for client software–the Web is the interface. The only issue is the security of the site.
Bantu ( www.bantu.com) provides the Net-cen-tric, instant collaboration backbone that unifies the separate enterprise portals of the U.S. Army, Air Force, and Navy. Each of the services has relied on the company for enterprise IM and presence management for a number of years.
Recently a technology that enables real-time interoperability across the portals was introduced. This allows authorized personnel from one service to search for, locate, and instantly communicate with their counterparts in the other services. And it does this while meeting the strict Department of Defense requirements for security, policy, and scalability. More than 3. 5 million military and government personnel access this service. Thus, we can assume that site is secure.
A similar service is employed by financial and educational organizations.
Services based on IM allow collaborative work-groups to be set up in seconds and torn down when no longer needed. But IM is also a baseline presence service–the foundation for a suite of real-time collaborative applications. Bantu’s platform, and those of other vendors, includes conferencing, presence management, collaborative alerting,
voice-enabled IM, and directory services. Thus, there is an added-value migration path.
Companies that outsource activities such as manufacturing employ federations (aka ecosystems) that comprise customers, suppliers, and other third parties. In this case, the service providers need to have local presence, so a global network is required.
The November issue of VON Magazine (see “Multiple Ways of Migrating to VoIP”) outlined the network of Verizon Business and its usage in the context of migrating the sites of large enterprises. However, the same facility can be used to bring ecosystem partners onto the same VoIP fabric.
As the name implies, Global Crossing (www. globalcrossing.com) has the requisite network as well as a service called VoIP Community Peering that features VoIP outbound and VoIP on-net telephony services. Calls from connected enterprises and carrier customers are not charged when made to VoIP local-service users. The service, which is accessed via a dial-in number, is therefore ideal for members of a particular community of interest such as inter-company departments, corporate subsidiaries, or user groups that call one another frequently.
Enterprises are facing new challenges such as interoperability between different IM networks, a
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