Improve Communications and Network Flexibility
Today, enterprises frequently rely on communications to help employees be productive and increase customer service. Cisco offers two technologies that work together to support these strategies.
Cisco Service-Oriented Network Architecture
The Cisco Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) provides a comprehensive network-based approach to business and technology integration. It extends beyond traditional network and application design and deployment strategies, which may be limited to dedicated hardware-based applications. At the integrated services layer, this architecture helps to enable virtualized network services across the enterprise, from campus to branch to data center to WAN to individual employee.
The integrated network services layer holds key infrastructure services, including:
- Security
- Mobility
- Storage
- Unified communications
- Computing
- Application delivery
- Identity
Capabilities previously available to only one particular application can now become shared services. This approach breaks down the isolation of functions and helps to virtualize common services across multiple:
- Applications
- Users
- Locations
- Devices
For maximum resiliency and operational efficiency, these services also allow a system to easily integrate capabilities throughout the network, including:
- Firewalls
- Highly reliable telephony at branch offices
- Quality of service
- Load balancing
Cisco Unified Communications ties next-generation communications services directly to business processes. This solution unifies voice, video, and data across a wide variety of devices and applications, creating a converged environment that supports today’s fast-changing enterprises. Many of these enterprises have employees who:
- Work remotely from multiple locations
- Use a variety of media and mobile devices
- Collaborate interactively across distances and time zones
- Communicate via:
- E-mail
- Instant messaging
- Video
- Voice
Technology Collaboration in Action
The applications layer in Cisco SONA supports Cisco collaboration applications, including:
- Telephony
- Unified messaging
- Video
- Web conferencing
- Customer contact
- Instant messaging
Cisco Unified Communications takes advantage of this architecture framework to provide business productivity and operational efficiencies.
With the power of shared services in this network architecture, companies of all sizes can take full advantage of their IT resources and more comprehensively align their business processes and technology. Following are three examples of this collaboration at work:
- A British social-services enterprise that provides signing services to hearing-impaired citizens, uses Cisco Unified Communications and Cisco SONA to create a distributed video-enabled call center service. The network architecture’s services help Significant to maximize its sign language interpreters’ time by allowing them to log in from anywhere in the United Kingdom.
Routing technology in Cisco Unified Contact Center allows the system to easily transfer video calls and direct customers to an interpreter who signs in their language. Clients previously had to make appointments and then wait up to two weeks for a costly 3-hour session with an interpreter, but users today have immediate access to inexpensive signing services using video kiosks throughout London boroughs and British Health Trusts.
- A large hospital complex in Germany combined Cisco Unified Communications with Cisco SONA to create a single converged infrastructure for voice, data, and video communications, and for administration, medical, and patient applications. As a result of its innovations, the hospital has been able to:
- Optimize point-of-care response
- Reduce medical errors
- Improve clinical productivity
- Increase overall patient satisfaction
- One of the world’s largest management consulting firms has created an innovative virtual facilities management application for its team. Because its employees travel constantly, working with clients in cities across the globe, the company wanted a technology solution that would:
- Improve consultant productivity
- Streamline the office space allocation process
- Lower real estate costs
- Provide superior communications for its mobile workforce
Now, when consultants arrive at a temporary office, they log in on the Cisco Unified IP Phone at that location, which activates automatic call and message forwarding and updates a database to note that the consultant is using that office space.
Cisco Unified Communications and Cisco SONA together take full advantage of open standards such as:
- XML
- SOAP
- SIP
- REST
- Other service-oriented protocols
Companies can easily add and integrate new features and functions through software upgrades and incremental hardware updates, building upon existing technology investments in their network infrastructure. Together, Cisco SONA and Cisco Unified Communications open up new possibilities for innovation and productivity breakthroughs.
