Networks offer travel alternatives

From...

By Stephen Lee

(IDG) -- Enterprise IT managers are contemplating the future of their communications networks following the recent terrorist attacks. At the same time, vendors such as Avaya continue to roll out new offerings that capitalize on user interest in IT alternatives to travel.

"After Sept. 11, we're going to be more cautious about when to travel and when to get people on airplanes," said Chris Lauwers, CTO of Avistar Systems, a networking firm headquartered in Redwood Shores, Calif. "We'll just decide to travel less. And that will probably be a permanent [change]."

Hence, companies such as Avistar, which links 85 employees in six cities across the United States, are continuing to look to videoconferencing to connect their workers. In addition to concerns about airline safety, many companies are considering the technology as a way to circumvent the time constraints now imposed by greater airport security.

"For short hops, it used to be that we'd just pop down from Seattle to San Francisco for a day," said Bill Hankes, a spokesman for Seattle-based service provider Internap.

"I don't know that we're going to do that anymore, because now you spend two hours on each side sitting in the airport," he said.

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Indeed, stories such as Robert Mason's are now far from uncommon. Mason, the vice president of business development at V-SPAN, a networking company, recently held a videoconference with business partners in Austin, Texas, from V-SPAN's offices in King of Prussia, Pa.

"Austin's not a convenient place to get to from Philadelphia," Mason said, "and I knew that my 6 a.m. flight would now be complemented by another two hours of security at each end, which would mean that it would take me 24 hours to do a three-hour meeting. So I did the meeting on video, and I felt pretty good when I hung up about not having to take that flight back from Austin."

Not surprisingly, vendors are rushing to fill the breach with new products. Last week, AT&T rolled out a set of videoconferencing services and online tools that allow users to connect to one another via video bridging facilities. A video-on-demand service allows users to launch ad hoc video calls from a Web portal, and a scheduling tool enables online room reservations and bridge resource management.

Furthermore, in a bid to capture a larger portion of the executive-level audience, AT&T's Executive Video Conferencing Service offers such luxuries as a dedicated human assistant to manage the call, monitor bridge activity, and provide assistance throughout the call.

Other companies are turning to distributed communications that could prove more resilient in the event of another catastrophe, according to Nithya Ruff, director of product and solution management at Basking Ridge, N.J.-based communications vendor Avaya.

"There's a need to not have a single point of failure," Ruff said.

To that end, Avaya on Monday rolled out a speech-access component to its Unified Messenger solution, which gives users voice access to e-mail, voice, and fax messages, regardless of their geographical location. Users can also listen to voice readouts of their e-mail messages.

"This solution lets mobile workers perform the same functions when they're traveling as when they're in the office," said Robert Wohnoutka, Avaya's product line manager for unified messenger products.

Moreover, Avaya's entry is unique in the market because of its wide range of functionality, according to Wohnoutka, who pointed out that competing speech-access products such as Nortel's CallPilot and Cisco's Personal Assistant do not support e-mail, calendar, appointment, or task applications.

Most observers agreed that the long-lasting effects of the spike in demand for videoconferencing and unified messaging will depend largely on how quickly the United States returns to business as usual.