Sonus Harmony Product and Ecosystem Launch

Today, approximately 29% of all organizations have five or more legacy communication vendors in their infrastructure. 66% are multivendor, leaving only 34% as single vendor. As a result there is a strong demand among enterprises to leverage these investments in support of UCC both within the organization and across its value chain. With 66% of workers mobile and 70% of companies preferring to deliver software and services over the Cloud, the need for interoperability within the communications environment is very high indeed.

Bottom line – enterprises have to have the right communications and collaboration architecture to be successful. Today, that’s a three-tiered architecture. The tiers separate the communications service connections that are needed by applications and the delivery of those services across networks to devices or applications that access them. Think of “Access” as people using phones, PCs, tablets or a web application. Think of “Sessions” as setting up and executing an audio or video call or a screen share. Think of “Apps” as any application that wants to use the communication services – such as conferencing, contact center, messaging or any Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP) application.

In support of these business requirements, Sonus introduced its Sonus Harmony™ Architecture (Harmony) at ITEXPO West 2012. Harmony is a SIP-based application delivery and network unification architecture that orchestrates different elements – PBXs, communication applications, collaboration tools and a variety of clients and endpoints – to better integrate and create a truly UCC environment. The core of the architecture is at the session layer enabling a neutral session management capability that is not tightly coupled to any particular access or application layer component.

Using PBXs and endpoints customers already have, Sonus Session Manager is the glue that ties together these previously disparate infrastructures. Session management enables call set up and takedown, user authentication and registration, as well as application sequencing and rich SIP adaptation. It allows enterprises to combine what they know about users with information from the network policy engine and bring those altogether and make intelligent decisions about call setup and routing as well as the kind of applications invoked in order to do that. Session management enables the delivery of OTT voice, video and other communications applications across the entire environment in a truly agnostic way.

An adaptation library is available supporting multi-vendor PBX interoperability and the integration of complex applications flows. Out-of-the box integrations are currently available for Cisco, Avaya and Microsoft UCC environments among others. Application development vendors are currently exploring how session management enables them to create more robust solutions for their customers through the Sonus Session Manager capabilities for sequencing applications for communications integration with business processes.

At the application layer Sonus offers its Sonus Composer Software Developer Kit (SDK) which is comprised of a broad set of scripts, adapters and APIs that Java and web designers – from beginner to advanced – are able to use to rapidly integrate, develop and deploy new applications via Session Manager. Sonus is not an application provider nor do they plan to be in the future. Rather, they are engaged in building an ecosystem of application partners, Sonus Plus, who are offering applications that are pre-integrated and tested with Session Manager. The Sonus Plus program not only provides these developer tools to ecosystem partners, but offers training as well. In addition, a developer “sandbox” is available for use testing and certification prior to integration with Session Manager.

Then at the access layer, Sonus Harmony provides a number of valuable capabilities. From the session management perspective these include: policy enforcement, call control, message manipulation, signaling interworking, TLS/security, media services and transcoding. In addition, there’s availability of a wide range of session border controllers (SBCs) including those acquired with the recent NET acquisition that can act as a gateway element as well as an SBC.

What This Means to Customers

To Service Providers: Sonus Harmony is targeted at service providers who want to:

• Deliver Cloud-based UC applications hosted independent of existing Class 5 telephony or enterprise’s on-premise PBX
• Develop new hosted, Cloud-based UC apps or augment current application functionality.

In these cases the value proposition offered is the ability to rapidly deploy new services across existing environments, including fully hosted, Class 5 or managed on-premise enterprise networks.

To Enterprises: Organizations that require common applications to be delivered to all users, across multiple vendors and types of communication platforms (PBXs, MS, etc.) are prime candidates for Sonus Harmony. A common driver is having a large base of mobile knowledge workers who require access to mobile UCC tools.

The value proposition offered here is the ability to cap and leverage investment in their current heterogeneous infrastructures, unify them with Sonus Session Manager, and increase employee productivity with a common set of voice, video, fixed mobile convergence, and other applications; and offer services and applications to their employees (on site or remote) over the Cloud.