15. Unified Communications Integration Issues
and the Software to Cover Them

Since the mission of Unified Communications (UC) is to optimize enterprise business processes by unifying communication channels and enterprise information systems, the challenges of UC integration come to the forefront.

Some companies offer ready to use software that cover most of the integration requirements. But very often an integration tool needs to be developed as a custom solution, because of enterprise IT-infrastructure specificity.

Communications integration challenges can be of several natures.

PSTN Integration

Since integration with a PSTN is a critical requirement for an IP-telephony network, all the IP-telephony vendors provide gateways for integration of their IP-telephony platform with a PSTN. These gateways are also used for smooth migration from legacy PBX systems.

Integration of Heterogeneous IP-Telephony Networks

Another issue is integration of heterogeneous IP-telephony networks during merger and acquisition deals. Most of the leading IP-telephony vendors provide integration tools that allow their platform to be integrated with an IP-telephony network from one of the other vendors.

The integration challenges arise, when the 3rd party unified communication software used in an enterprise doesn’t support multiple vendors. This issue can be solved by building a bespoke gateway that allows the software to work with the IP PBX that it didn’t originally support.

In this case, integration of existing IP-telephony software with a heterogeneous IP PBX and IP phones is a good alternative to purchasing new software with multivendor support.

Integration of Enterprise IP-Telephony with 3rd Party Communication Software

This is where an indistinct “Unified Messaging” term appears, which usually means inclusion of incoming faxes and voicemail to one’s email inbox. But there are much more integration challenges, such as:

• integration with 3rd party VoIP software – for example, a gateway that allows incoming Skype calls to be received on your IP-phone;
• integration with 3-rd party web-conferencing software – Cisco’s acquisition of WebEx in 2007 is the first thing comes to mind;
• SMS gateways that allow you to use an IP phone to send and receive SMS messages.

Lots of integration products are available on the market that integrate IP-telephony network with the most useful communication software.

Nevertheless, some companies use a unique set of communication tools as a corporate standard. In this case, integration of existing communication software with IP-telephony requires a custom solution to be developed, which is often less expensive, than migrating to new communication tools.

Integration of a Unified Communication Solution with Enterprise Software

A more interesting challenge that we often meet is integration of IP-telephony software with enterprise applications. These are just several typical examples of when it is required:

1) Integration of IP-telephony software with an HR database: the changes in organizational structure should be reflected in the IP-telephony application user database.

This can be achieved by building a synchronizing service that traces the changes in a HR database and triggers modification of the IP-telephony software database.

2) Integration of a contact center solution with several heterogeneous customer databases to boost the contact center productivity: an incoming call should open the corresponding application, showing the customer card, and, conversely, an operator must be able to initiate a phone call using the interface of any customer database.

This can be solved by an integration tool built using SOA, when the contact center software is integrated with the bus that has connectors to every customer database used.

3) Integration of a call accounting application with billing software for the reports generated by the call accounting software to be automatically exported to the billing system.

A custom designed tool will transform call reports to the billing system format.

4) Integration of a voice portal with enterprise applications to authenticate the caller and provide him with the appropriate status/tracking/balance information.

So, integration of IP telephony solutions with existing software will help you incorporate your enterprise communications into your business processes.

Read the next chapter: 16. When to Consider Building Custom IP Telephony Software

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