Now comes the next phase, that of rich media, which incorporates broadband interactive multimedia as a fundamental feature. In this phase, sound and video join the Internet party. Your IT infrastructure, support services and applications mix must ultimately empower the people within and outside your organization to leverage the new capabilities for human interaction made possible by emerging digital-convergence technologies.

Widespread use of digital audio and video multimedia will increase the demand for network bandwidth considerably. Real-time interactive applications require a combination of low latency and uninterrupted transmission. Applications such as IP telephony, streaming media, unified messaging, Internet videoconferencing, and real-time whiteboard and application sharing won't work without an infrastructure that includes policy-based networking with traffic management and greater amounts of bandwidth.

The rich-media phase makes earlier forms of networking -- shared Ethernet connections and some router deployment -- look about as sophisticated as a child's cups-and-string telephone. Getting to this point demands difficult technical and budgetary decisions that determine when, where and how your network will enable convergence.

You will have to determine the parameters for overprovisioning various aspects of your network and when to pursue effective bandwidth management. You'll need to find mechanisms for equipping mobile users and telecommuters with rich-media digital-convergence technologies. You'll also need to get up to speed on multicasting -- which enables one-to-many streaming -- to determine how it can work for your applications. And you'll have to stay on top of QoS, caching schemes and other technologies being implemented by service providers, such as UUNet and Akamai, across the public Internet.

It makes sense to give priority to mission-critical applications such as ERP and other transaction-processing systems, and the leftover bandwidth to rich media. Still, you'll need to understand rich-media technologies' big-picture benefits, even though they don't immediately affect the bottom line. They may be more important than what you see at first blush.

Take streaming media as an example. Some IT managers view this as a toy technology used primarily for desktop Internet radio. True, there are those who will use it mostly for that. But while users may become comfortable with this technology listening to their favorite music genre, the value of new e-learning content and services that integrate streaming audio and video could greatly improve employee and enterprise performance over the long haul. Numerous viable and valuable applications exist--technical training, B2B telephone interviews with industry executives, live seminars featuring university scholars, and sophisticated rich-media content from e-learning providers such as Caliber and HorizonLive.

Enterprise Applications

There are several enterprise digital-convergence applications and technologies you may want or need to deploy sometime soon.

• Voice over IP (VoIP) is an emerging technology that promises significant cost savings for your enterprise. By moving voice and data across a single infrastructure, you eliminate the need for dual service and support. IP-telephony technologies and applications run the gamut from end-user PC-based Internet phone services, such as Net2Phone and Dialpad, to enterprise technology from the likes of Cisco and Avaya, which offer Ethernet phone handsets, IP-enabled PBXes, IP-telephony servers and PSTN gateways.

  For organizations with geographically dispersed offices, VoIP offers a mechanism for bypassing the PSTN. In more ambitious enterprises, a move to IP-enabled PBXes can allow IP-telephony access via analog handsets. Large organizations can do this with an upgrade to the existing PBX, while smaller companies are often better off acquiring a pure-IP PBX. Another alternative is to rip out your entire enterprise telephony infrastructure and replace it with an IP-telephony server and Ethernet handsets, but this is not for the faint of heart. The prudent path is to consider one or more incremental steps -- a long-distance toll bypass or a PBX upgrade -- and then wait for the technology to mature, for IETF and ITU standards to converge, and for costs to decline.

  Enterprise IP telephony is one application that makes sense to implement and support in-house. For many other digital-convergence technologies and applications, outsourcing will be a viable option you'll want to consider. New call-center technology offers a good example.

• Call-center technology was, not too long ago, the domain of the telecom manager in most enterprises. With the advent of CTI (computer-telephony integration), the call-center function began to merge with the functions of IT. Now, in many organizations, the IT department has assumed full responsibility for telecom management, and must oversee call-center operations and integrate call-center functions as part of a CRM (customer relationship management) strategy. With the Web and e-mail now widely used, and as various rich-media communication options gain momentum, customer expectations for service or sales interactions that incorporate e-mail, chat and VoIP are rapidly evolving. There's also the nagging difficulty of finding customer-service employees to staff the call center. New call-center technology can handle multiple media while creating a virtual call center that ties together telecommuting service representatives. Companies that don't establish an effective CRM strategy incorporating solid call-center technology will soon find themselves at a severe competitive disadvantage.

  Companies To Watch

  Converged call-center server systems are expensive, and the expertise for implementing and managing a digital call center is scarce. Many IT managers are running themselves ragged just trying to stay on top of basic network file and application services; getting staff up to speed on call-center hardware, software and integration issues may be out of the question. Fortunately, there are increasingly more outsourcing options, including telco providers, call-center operators who provide call-center seats, and call-center consultants. The ASP model figures to be big in this space, as CRM players such as Oracle and Siebel roll out ASP versions of their products, while smaller outfits like Synchrony offer ASP-based outsourcing that bundles the telephony piece with thin-client access to customer histories housed in remote ASP databases.

• Streaming media is poised to become a prominent digital-convergence technology, with near-VHS video quality now possible via products from Apple, Microsoft and RealNetworks. Streaming media is also a great fit for packet-switched networks, since the buffered play masks network latency and jitter delay.

  Streaming-media applications vary considerably, complicating the process of identifying them and developing an enterprise strategy. For example, streaming media can be live or on demand. It can take the form of video contained within an e-mail message, or it can appear as a stream of synchronized video, text and PowerPoint slides embedded in a Web page. Applications can vary from in-house training to external customer service, security monitoring or advertising. Video content can be high-quality media geared toward top-level corporate decision-makers, or raw black-and-white real-time streams that monitor lab facilities. The nature of the applications you envision will determine your streaming-media deployment strategy.

  Here, too, you'll face the outsource-or-not decision. On-demand intranet streaming is fairly easy to implement, but even then you may not have the in-house media production expertise to deliver quality material. You may want to do a live Webcast when you expect a large Internet viewership, pushing you toward an outsourced arrangement with an Akamai or a Digital Island. Or, if you're in a small company with limited streaming-media technical expertise and dollars, you may need to keep it simple and inexpensive. And you may be able to find a small studio with the appropriate streaming facilities and expertise to handle your application at a reasonable cost.

  Perhaps you want to focus on a specific application, such as e-learning, in which case you could outsource to an ASP such as CE3000.com. Or you may want to secure the services of a Web development outfit that can integrate streaming media with your public Internet presence. The outsourcing options are wide-ranging, as are emerging streaming-media applications.

• Internet videoconferencing is a digital-convergence technology that looks promising but has some serious hurdles to overcome before becoming a mainstream business application. Although the technology has been around for many years, it's never caught on among business users, primarily because of the difficulties of ensuring reasonable-quality interactive video over the public Internet or across stressed corporate WAN connections.

  While your enterprise LAN can support quality conferencing, this technology is all about overcoming distance barriers. The farther apart participants are, the more likely it is they'll use the public Internet or a corporate WAN connection -- where latency and traffic congestion occur. Thus, this technology remains the domain of hobbyists, college students and pornographers. Internet QoS mechanisms must be in place and bandwidth less costly before Internet videoconferencing becomes a factor in the enterprise.

While you may not choose to implement Internet videoconferencing across the enterprise anytime soon, you will undoubtedly encounter users in your organization who regularly use Microsoft NetMeeting and other similar conferencing tools--independent of you and your organization. This exemplifies a trend that will see an increasing number of your users flocking to rich-media digital-convergence applications, with or without your help.

Digital-convergence technologies and applications enable new forms of human communication, interaction and collaboration. Individual users and workgroups can often implement these capabilities easily: Download a streaming player. Fire up NetMeeting. Install a free, 20-stream RealServer. Use Dialpad to call long-distance -- at no charge. This sort of behavior has already been happening in enterprise settings to some degree, and users are only warming up.

Consumer broadband creates an empowering user experience, further stimulating this trend. Wireless, rich-media-enabled portable devices -- PDAs and Web phones -- will also empower a growing number of mobile users with new resources and types of interaction. Add to this an increasingly technology-savvy work force, and you'll have a tough time explaining why the firewall cuts RealPlayer off at the knees when viewing an external Webcast on the corporate desktop.

Despite -- or, more likely, because of -- users' enthusiastic adoption of these technologies, IT must handle the important job of deploying, standardizing and supporting strategic digital-convergence technologies. You'll need to make a proactive effort to survey the applications of new technology that bubble up and out from the trenches rather than emanating from the central IT core. Create a partnership with your users, and support the business applications they explore and gravitate toward.