Open Source Unified Communications: The New Paradigm to Cut Costs and Extend Productivity Fernando Almeida
José Cruz
Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, s/n 4200-465, Porto, Portugal +351 22 508 14 00
Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, s/n 4200-465, Porto, Portugal +351 22 508 14 00
[email protected]
[email protected]
ABSTRACT In this paper, we propose an architecture based on three layers (infrastructure, server hardware and operating system, and business applications) for a unified communications solutions exclusively sustained on open source technologies and open standards. Additionally, we discuss the importance of open standards and open source in a fully integrated communications solution, exposing some factors that a company should consider when choosing open source software.
Categories and Subject Descriptors C.2.1 [Network Architecture and Design]: Network communications; D.2.11 [Software Architectures]: Domainspecific architectures.
Enterprises can achieve significant savings by adopting a Unified Communications (UC) platform. Such platform is based on the foundation of three key pillars [2]: user experience (increasing user productivity and effectiveness), communications enabled business process (CEBT) (the ability to embed communications and collaboration modalities into business systems) and unified infrastructure (driving business agility through the rapid deployment of new applications).
2. PROPOSED ARCHITECTURE We propose an architecture based on three layers like it is presented in Figure 1.
General Terms Design.
Keywords Unified Communications, Open Source, Open Standards, System Architecture, IP-PBX.
1. INTRODUCTION For the past century and even in the last decade, communication systems have been delivered as closed, proprietary silos of technology for each type of communications – telephony, fax, voice mail, e-mail, instant messaging, conferencing, etc. But now, new communication systems and solutions are being delivered as flexible software-based platforms with open and extensible APIs and software development tools that enable the incorporation of multiple communications modalities in the enterprise operations. The flexibility and efficiency of software-based communications functionality and the ability of software to manage the streams of digital media (e.g., voice, text, images and video) enable the appearance of integrated solutions that were wither not possible or not affordable in the recent past. Based on these new capabilities, enterprises can now re-examine their operations, business processes, and workflows to find those places where the old methods of communications or the lack of communications are causing barriers or bottlenecks [1]. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. OSDOC'12, June 11, 2012, Lisbon, Portugal. Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1284-4/12/0006..$10.00.
Figure 1. Proposed architecture for UC. The proposed architecture adopts only open source and open standard platforms. This option will allow low up-front and implementation costs and simultaneously increases interoperability. According to Kanaparti [3], in order to allow an enterprise to create unified communications solutions designed to work with its own set of applications and technologies, adherence to open standards is key. As a consequence, enterprises will continue to have a choice: to install multiple applications from a single vendor or have the option to incorporate best-of-breed products from proprietary and open source domains, considering that both adopts open standards.
2.1 Infrastructure The lowest layer contains a physical IP infrastructure network that supports both real-time and non-real time traffic. The main function of this building block is to allow voice communications using IP telephony platforms, wired/wireless clients and video conferencing. Simultaneously, and according to Honnef [4], this layer should provide a QoS manager engine to give high priority to voice traffic and monitor the IP traffic. In our architecture we chose to use an implementation of OpenSIPS as SIP server and sipXecs as IP PBX. OpenSIPS is a mature open source implementation of a SIP server that is responsible for controlling multimedia communication sessions such as voice and video calls over the internet. With a very flexible and customizable routing engine, OpenSIPS unifies voice,
video, IM and presence services in a highly efficient way, thanks to its scalability and modular design [5]. While sipXecs is an open source implementation of a IP PBX system that offers full leadsharing redundancy for the call control system avoiding calls to be interrupted and it is designed to integrate into an advanced IT environment including Web Services based on SOAP for all configuration [6].
2.2 Server Hardware and Operating System The Server Hardware and Operating System layer is responsible to offer a package of services that can be used in a UC communications scenario. The Table 1 presents our suggestions of applications that can be used to provide the most common services that support IP communications. Additionally, security issues must be addressed at each layer. For that, we propose the use of ClamAV, BitDefender or Fiaf. Finally, we suggest the adoption of the Linux system in this architecture. Table 1. OS servers’ applications for Linux OS Server
Tool(s)
Email server
Qmail, Sendmail, SquirrelMail
Web server
Apache
File server
ProFTPD, MySecureShell
Domain server
Bind, PowerDNS
Printer server
CUPS, PDQ
Database server
Mysql, Postgresql
2.3 Business Applications The core idea of this layer is to integrate communications capabilities into software-enabled business processes, by providing applications with the ability to initiate real-time communications. The notion is that by combining integrated communications functionality with the insights that can be gained through the use of enterprise software, organizations will gain the ability to have their systems sense events, manage communications and track activity to closure [7]. The UC platform shall be integrated with applications such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Management (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Content Management Systems (CMS). Attending to our proposed architecture based in open source technologies running in Linux OS system, we suggest the use of SugarCRM as CRM system, Sequoia ERP as ERP and SCM system, and Drupal as CMS system.
3. DISCUSSION The proposed architecture based on open standards bring important benefits to a traditional UC solution. Support of open industry standards increases the degree of architecture design flexibility and third party interoperability. It reduces dependence on proprietary hardware/software elements and can significantly contribute to minimizing design, engineering, and manufacturing costs. Additionally, OSS gives the freedom to customize or enhance the code to suite the enterprise exact needs. Finally, with no license costs, OSS starts with a clear advantage over proprietary software and this has lasting impact on the TCO.
However, the adoption of an open source unified communication does not come without some risks. With property applications, companies are buying a legal license, which protects them and the seller. In this case, the company that sells the software is obligated to provide technical support to the customer. However, using OSS, companies could be faced with situations of needing some quick answers but find that it either does not get it in a timely manner, get no support at all, or they have to pay a significant fee for help. This issue could be mitigated if the OSS project has a strong community that typically provides high active and useful forums. Another issue is to consider that free licenses necessarily equate with low TCO. This is a mistake, because waiting to develop, configure and deploy an OSS often has opportunity costs that are overlooked. Finally, companies shall only adopt OSS solutions if there is sufficient evidence that there is a plan for future enhancements and developments, and some confidence in the long-term sustainability of the system.
4. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK UC provide an integrated portfolio of capabilities and services, enabling organizations to increase business agility and leverage increasingly dynamic and flexible working practices. The proposed architecture exclusively based on open sources technologies and opens standards will provide enterprises with a UC platform with lower costs of ownership, faster time to deploy new solutions and greater flexibility. At the same time, it will also enable greater mobility and functionality for end users. As future work, it would be interesting to extend the proposed architecture to integrate Web 2.0 applications. The combination of Web 2.0 and unified communications enables the use of social software in business contexts, what is currently referred as Enterprise 2.0.
5. REFERENCES [1] Parker, M. and Doren, D. 2011. CEBP Value. Technical Report. UniComm Consulting. [2] Ted, G. 2011. Evaluating Avaya & Microsoft Unified Communications Offerings. Technical Report. Evangelyze Communications. [3] Kanaparti, S. 2008. A distributed-SOA model for unified communication services. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Web Services (Beijing, China, September 23 – 26, 2008). ICWS’08. IEEE, New Jersey, NJ, 529-536. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICWS.2008.127 [4] Honnef, B. 2008. The Future of IP Interconnection: Technical, Economic and Public Policy Aspects. Technical Report. WIK-Consult. [5] Nahum, E., Tracey, J. and Wright, C. 2007. Evaluating SIP Server Performance. Technical Report. IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. [6] Segec, P. and Kovacikova, T. 2011. A survey of Open Source products for building SIP communication platform. Advances in Multimedia. 11, 1 (November. 2011), 1-21. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2011/372591 [7] Burns, M., Craig, B., Friedman, B., Schott, P. and Senot, C. 2011. Transforming enterprise communications through the blending of social networking and unified communications. Bell Labs Tec. Journal. 16, 1 (May. 2011), 19-34. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bltj.20483
