Today’s global business climate, combined with IP and advanced communication technologies, has created a new approach for busy professionals and IT teams who are trying to gain a technology edge while balancing their personal lifestyles. Those who know how to use communications intelligently can gain real business advantages and those who don’t are more than likely to lose out. With that direction in mind, a whole lot of us are compelled to stay connected, so we’re using smart phones and other devices as essential parts of our daily lives. But there is more going on here for some mobile people who are more intelligently connected than first meets the eye.

While many of us are now beginning to grasp the real implications of newly developed IP and communications applications loaded on our devices, the latest infrastructure technologies, along with new types of business processes, are being coupled to our daily business activities. It is likely that this confluence of mobility applications, new device types, and IT infrastructure and business processes will be dramatic as the mobile market continues its high growth.

New mobility applications are currently or soon will be “powered” by many different enabling technologies including EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution), WiFi Alliance 802.11n (the new Wireless Local Area Network Standard based on Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 802.11n protocols), and 3G (third generation mobile phone technology) and 4G (fourth generation mobile phone technology) that include WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access), UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System), HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access) and HSUPA (High-Speed Uplink Packet Access)/HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access), etc. This means that IT teams must once again cope with emerging protocols while still aligning other projects with more traditional PBX communication and IP networks. Many managers and even corporate executives expect that IT, system integrators and service provider teams will support appropriate and emerging mobility technologies promptly if they have the potential to help businesses. But what are the implications to these expectations? Remember all those rogue 802.11b WiFi access points the workforce smuggled into their offices? Are there dramatic implications for WiMAX, for example, to impact security standards or overlap with today’s corporate networks?

Some of us gain an intelligent advantage by connecting certain model Nokia®, Samsung®, Motorola® or other cell phones (e.g., BlackberryTM) directly with our enterprise IP telephony networks to enable full PBX functionality while supporting business mobility applications. By enabling true phone bridging (instead of using call forwarding) between our office phone extensions and our mobile phones, we can maintain seamless “toll bypass” connections of our business activities even when we are away from our work space.

Some professionals are taking this desk phone extension to cellular concept further by using “hybrid” cellular/wireless IP phones that also connect us to our corporate PBX functionality via standard hotspots – one phone for office and mobile use. So now we not only get PBX capabilities but we also get toll bypass connections while we conference our business contacts – even in distant countries – via high quality connections at low cost. Specifically, it is important to point out the implications of international toll bypass. Large investment banks can face multi-million dollar cellular roaming bills as investment bankers and research analysts travel globally. With improved integration between communications platforms and their business applications, financial services professionals can shave hundreds of thousands of dollars – or more – off their roaming charges while translating advantages from better communications capabilities into higher business productivity.

From her remote home office, an executive assistant to the president of a large financial services company speaks from a secured VPN phone that links to her corporate office phone. With this arrangement, she can connect directly over the Internet with “toll bypass” to the company’s IP telephony system, record the conversation and forward the call to the firm’s executive vice president. She can do this while staying protected from any eavesdropping risk from an Internet hacker or competitive business spy.

Another client account manager who also works for this same financial services company uses his IP softphone, launched over a VPN client and connected via a private WiFi connection, from remote locations while he concurrently uses spreadsheets to make deals. He uses a notebook computer with a softphone that supports Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) with presence and instant messaging. SIP communications are integrated with his Outlook application, so he can set up his contact list and use presence detection to sync time management alerts with his friends, customers and business associates. This manager has also established policies and rules via his SIP-based application so he can balance his personal life while conducting business anytime and from anywhere. He has set up presence priorities in context with external contact schedules and policies to determine who to connect with, at what time, and with what type of device. He has also created a proxy contact connection for someone who can stand in to make a decision when he can’t be available.

Intelligent converged communication users who rely on mobility or remote connectivity want to stay connected almost everywhere at any desired time. But how do we sort or differentiate the most important communications from the “noise” that is coming from the not so important contacts? What about urgent business actions or other important decisions waiting for us that we might not know about because no one is connected to the right process to alert us initially? How do we really remove the latencies from our daily business lives so we can focus on the most important decisions and communications no matter where we are located?

Going forward, effectively addressing these considerations will be handled best through a new solution area called Communication Enabled Business Processes or CEBP. Simply stated: CEBP = real time communications + closed loop interaction within business processes.

CEBP solutions are not only focused on mobility areas, but they are logical extensions of an IP telephony and converged network foundation. The intelligent concept behind CEBP is to analyze our business actions, challenges and processes, determine where it makes the most sense to eliminate process latencies and then integrate a solution that automates near instant communications with alerts and conferencing to “close the loop” on issues and actions. CEBP technology solutions are being designed right now to integrate VoIP, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), communication objects, web services, mobility applications, converged communications, distributed contact centers and/or unified communications.

There is much more to discuss about this high impact area then we can put in words here, so here is a final thought about CEBP: “CEBP will produce huge value. To illustrate the magnitude of the potential of CEBP, we can compare it to the advent of the Internet in the 1990s. The internet was a huge efficiency engine. CEBP will be even more of an efficiency engine.’ -Nick Lippis, The Intelligent Communicator, March 2007.

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Tony Kleckner is Director, Financial Services Industry Practice, Avaya, Inc., 212-841-6222; email: kleckner@avaya.com; web: www.avaya.com.