The role of the CIO has changed more in the past five years than any other position in the corporate world. Historically, the CIO and IT department has been responsible for managing and running the technology infrastructure and has had little to do with augmenting the business. Today, IT leaders are tasked with deploying technology to drive the business and be a catalyst for change.

1. Virtual Infrastructure Creates
Communications Agility
June 2013
Prepared by:
Zeus Kerravala

2. Virtual Infrastructure Creates Communications Agility
by Zeus Kerravala
June 2013
º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º º
Introduction: The Need for Communications Agility
The role of the CIO has changed more in the past five years than any other
position in the corporate world. Historically, the CIO and IT department has been
responsible for managing and running the technology infrastructure and has had
little to do with augmenting the business. Today, IT leaders are tasked with
deploying technology to drive the business and be a catalyst for change.
In conjunction with the changing role of the CIO, a new world of work is
emerging. Competitive advantage is defined by speed and agility. This means
making the best decision in a fraction of the time it took before. This can only be
done by harnessing the power of the extended enterprise and bringing the right
people together at a moment’s notice — making collaboration a key initiative for
almost every company today. To enable the new world of work, today’s CIO must
deliver the following:
• Unified communications and collaboration (UCC) must be mainstream:
If making faster decisions is the key to competitive advantage, a robust UCC
solution is the foundational platform on which competitive advantage will be
built. UCC has been a nice-to-have for many organizations, but is now a
need-to-have. Exhibit 1 shows most organizations have unified
communications (UC) partially deployed, but full deployment remains in the
minority.
Exhibit 1: UC Is Widely Deployed, But Not Deeply Deployed
What is the status of UC within your organization?
Source: ZK Research, 2013
ZK Research
A Division of Kerravala
Consulting
zeus@zkresearch.com
Cell: 301-775-7447
Office: 978-252-5314
Influence and insight
through social media
© 2013 ZK Research
Influence and insight through social media

3. • Greater IT agility: Corporate leaders are
focused on creating a more agile business —
capable of changing direction on a moment’s
notice. However, it is impossible to deliver
greater business agility without an agile IT
environment.
• Communications agility: A few areas of IT
have become more agile; but not
communications. The static nature of
communications technology makes change
intensive and difficult. To deliver a truly agile IT
environment, communications must evolve and
align with the rest of IT.
• The network must become strategic: Almost
every company has strategies to better leverage
cloud and mobile computing. Mobile and cloud
computing are network-centric compute models
and the network will play a key role in delivering
a high-quality user experience (see Exhibit 1).
• Virtualization must be a strategic technology:
Historically, virtualization has been used
tactically to consolidate servers — and save
significant money. However, it has evolved
during the past few years, and can support the
most compute and IO-intensive applications,
such as communications technology. IT leaders
must use virtualization more strategically, to
deliver more than just server consolidation.
In today’s increasingly competitive business
environment, it’s critical to have the maximum level
of agility to respond to competitive threats quickly.
Because businesses are looking to enable agility
through better collaboration strategies, IT leaders
should make delivering a robust communications
infrastructure built on virtual resources an important
short-term initiative.
Section II: The Challenges with Existing
Communications Infrastructure
Delivering an agile communications solution is
critical to business success. However, the existing
infrastructure is not well aligned to this vision.
Although current solutions use IP as
communications protocol, architectures have not
changed significantly. Legacy PBXs were built on
dedicated hardware and while highly reliable, offered
very little in the way of flexibility and agility. Other
challenges with existing communications solutions
are:
• Lengthy upgrade cycles: On a legacy system,
upgrading or regular maintenance often requires
swapping out hardware and a site visit. This can
mean a companywide system upgrade, and can
take weeks or even months. Long lead times
can cause companies to miss out on business
opportunities.
• Lack of flexibility: Hardware-only solutions are
designed for static environments and are not
flexible enough for rapid scalability. Features
upgrades, bug fixes and maintenance can be
lengthy, given the rigidity of hardware platforms.
• Inconsistent features across the company:
Legacy infrastructure is deployed on a location-
by-location basis. Each building or office may
have its own call infrastructure, often from
different vendors. This can impair productivity,
as workers are accustomed to working a certain
way in one location and must alter it in another.
• Long lead times for new features:
Implementing new features on legacy solutions
often requires administrators to upgrade
software and sometimes even hardware — one
location at a time. For large organizations, the
process of adding new features or upgrading
systems could take weeks or even months.
• Inefficient workflows: Typically companies
deploy collaboration tools individually — with no
integration between applications such as audio
conferencing, Web conferencing, voice and
video systems. Workers often must log into
multiple applications to have a single, virtual
meeting. This can be an awkward way to
collaborate, and leads to inefficient meetings.
• Communications must evolve: While the
majority of IT has been transformed by
virtualization, communications infrastructure has
yet to realize the benefits. Server virtualization is
now mainstream (see Exhibit 2) and if IT
organizations want to achieve the level of agility
needed for today’s rapidly changing business
environment, it’s time for communications to
evolve and take advantage of virtualization.
© 2013 ZK Research
Influence and insight through social media

4. Exhibit 2: Server Virtualization is Now Mainstream
What percent of servers are virtualized compared to five years ago?
Source: ZK Research, 2013
Section III: Virtual Infrastructure
Transforms Communications
Virtualization has had a dramatic impact on IT
infrastructure costs, deployment time and
operational support. Prior to being virtualized,
compute infrastructure such as servers and storage
had an average utilization rate of 25 percent. Today
the utilization rate of infrastructure that leverages
virtualization is well over 50 percent, reaching as
high as 70 percent in some organizations.
Virtualization also has a significant impact on
personnel costs. ZK Research calculates that
organizations with over 50 percent of workloads
virtualized see the amount of people-related costs
fall from 40 percent to 30 percent of TCO.
Historically the communications industry has
avoided using virtual platforms; virtual servers, while
flexible, did not have the performance characteristics
to power real-time communications platforms. During
the past five years, virtualization has evolved to a
point where it can support even the most mission-
critical workloads.
Virtualization abstracts communication services such
as call processing, session management and
presence service above physical hardware to run on
a virtual platform (Exhibit 3). The services run on a
VM similarly to the way other corporate applications
are run today.
Exhibit 3: Virtual Services Create Communications Agility
Source: ZK Research, 2013
© 2013 ZK Research
Influence and insight through social media

5. As virtualization becomes a bigger part of the
communications industry, the following shifts occur:
• Communications becomes an agile resource:
Decoupling communications services from
hardware allows UC applications a greater level
of agility than ever before. Virtualization means
applications can be invoked almost on-demand,
migrated from one location to the other and
managed like any other virtual workload.
• Communications resource utilization
improves: Historically the average utilization of
communications infrastructure has been slightly
better than compute, but still far below optimal.
ZK Research estimates that by leveraging
virtualization, the utilization of communications
infrastructure will improve from 35 percent to
more than 70 percent.
• UC moves to an as-a-service model: Lack of
flexibility with hardware-based communications
limited the deployment model for services such
as voice and video to on-premise. Organizations
needed to provision services for peak utilization.
By shifting to a virtual platform, companies can
provision the level of services required to meet
demand today, and add more resources on-
demand, as required.
• Network trends align better with
communications: The flexibility and agility
gained from virtual platforms allows
communications services to interoperate with
the network better. The rise of network
virtualization and software-defined networks
(SDNs) combined with virtual communications
infrastructure enables the network to
automatically reconfigure when voice and video
services require it.
• Unprecedented scalability: Historically, the
scalability of communication services was
limited to the underlying hardware platform. If an
organization needed more performance than the
platform would allow, a forklift upgrade was
required. By shifting the services to a virtual
platform and decoupling the service from the
hardware, the underlying hardware can be
upgraded without interrupting the services
running on virtual machines.
The emergence of virtual environments for
communications services will deliver better
scalability and utilization while lowering the overall
total cost of ownership. Additionally, companies that
leverage virtualization for their next-generation
communication services will realize the following
benefits:
• Greater alignment between business
demands and communications: The use of
virtual platforms means IT leaders can respond
to line-of-business requirements in a fraction of
the time required by legacy solutions. Services
can be provisioned in days if not hours,
compared to the weeks or months it used to
take.
• Ability to deliver the right services to the
right locations: With legacy infrastructure, the
services followed the hardware platform, making
it difficult to add new features to remote
locations. Virtual infrastructure allows new
services to be added whenever and wherever IT
wishes. This ensures the right services are
deployed to the right locations all of the time.
• Ease of management: Virtual infrastructure,
whether deployed locally or not, can be
managed from a central location. IT managers
can update, migrate and administer services
without having to travel to each location.
• Enables bring-your-own-device (BYOD):
BYOD has been a top initiative for CIOs and
other IT leaders. The use of a virtual platform
makes it easier to scale and deploy
communication services. As the number of
consumer devices in the workplace continues to
grow, IT will need to deliver these services to
two to three times the number of devices used in
the workplace today. This is nearly impossible to
deliver with legacy infrastructure.
Section IV: What to Look For In a
Solution Provider
The migration of communications to virtual
infrastructure is a significant evolutionary step
toward the vision of delivering any service to any
device. This transformation brings greater scale,
reliability and deployment flexibility to
communications infrastructure at a significantly lower
cost, making it a key initiative for IT organizations.
However, the choice of solution provider may not be
obvious. ZK Research offers these guidelines to
help IT decision-makers find an effective provider:
• Offers a broad portfolio that meets the needs
of companies of all sizes: The solution
provider should offer platforms that meet the
needs of companies of any size, from small
businesses through the largest companies. This
ensures the solution is not underpowered, and
the company is not spending more money than
required.
© 2013 ZK Research
Influence and insight through social media

6. • Flexible deployment options: While a virtual
platform provides many benefits, it may not be
right for all companies. The vendor should offer
a solution in all different form factors, including
dedicated hardware, software, virtual solutions
and integrated platforms.
• Robust set of UC services: Effective
collaboration is about bringing all collaborative
applications together. It’s imperative that the
solution provider offer a broad UC suite
including voice, video, chat, presence,
conferencing, mobile and call-center solutions.
• Built on open standards: Many solution
providers offer products that leverage highly
proprietary protocols or technologies to get
products to market faster. This may seem
appealing initially, but can lead to vendor lock-in
and a lack of long-term choice. A solution built
on open standards offers the best deployment
options today and for the foreseeable future.
• Leverages de facto standards: There is no
solution provider that can offer every piece of a
deployment. The solution provider should
leverage leading partners such as VMware and
EMC to offer a complete solution.
• Network portfolio to support the
communications infrastructure: The network
plays a key role in the performance of real-time
applications such as voice and video. It is often
the right choice to use a solution provider that
can complement communications applications
with a robust data portfolio.
• A preconfigured, pretested, turnkey solution:
Many organizations want to leverage the
flexibility of virtualization, but do not have the
necessary skill set to put the solution together
themselves. Solution providers should offer a
turnkey solution that includes servers, storage,
network, security and communications
infrastructure as well as management and
security to deliver a rapid deployment without
the integration complexity.
• Communications-grade infrastructure: The
virtual solution must be every bit as reliable,
robust and resilient as traditional hardware-
based platforms. It’s crucial that organizations
do not sacrifice communications redundancy
when moving to a virtualized solution.
• APIs to integrate with business applications:
UC’s migration to software and virtual platforms
paves a path to communications-enabled
applications. Vendors must offer rich north-
bound APIs to allow integration of UC features
into business applications.
Section V: Conclusion and
Recommendations
The migration of communications to software was a
significant milestone for the industry, as it allowed for
centralization of infrastructure and rapid deployment.
Virtualization is now driving the next generation of
collaboration solutions, as it brings the same agility
and flexibility to the communications industry as it
brought to servers and storage over the past
decade. IT leaders that wish to create a dynamic
communications environment should look to
leverage the power of virtualization. To help
understand how to best do this, ZK Research offers
the following recommendations:
• Embrace virtualization as part of the
communications strategy: Virtualization
technology has rapidly evolved over the past few
years and it’s now fully capable of supporting the
most demanding applications, such as voice and
video. It’s time leave behind legacy
environments and align communications with the
rest of the IT organization.
• Change the underlying architecture to take
advantage of virtual platforms: The current
node-by-node deployment architecture served
the industry well in the era of dedicated
hardware. The shift to software and virtualization
mandates that a more centralized architecture
be used and the network becomes leveraged as
the delivery platform.
• Break with the status quo when selecting a
solution provider: Making a decision based on
market share or vendor incumbency can often
mean faster decisions and can be an adequate,
although not optimal choice in a legacy market.
However, in times of market transition, this can
often lead to solutions that are cobbled together
and lagging behind the innovative vendors. Use
a solution provider that has a solution built for
this era of communications, and has optimized
the solution for virtualization.
© 2013 ZK Research: A Division of Kerravala Consulting
All rights reserved. Reproduction or redistribution in any form without the express prior permission of ZK Research is expressly prohibited.
For questions, comments or further information, email zeus@zkresearch.com.