Digital convergence has evolved from its simple beginnings. Today it's all about technologies that deliver audio, graphics, text and video in VoIP systems, multimedia presentations, training videos and executive communications to customers, employees and partners throughout the enterprise and worldwide. By 2005, 90 percent of Global 2000 firms will deploy interactive conferencing, according to Meta Group.
While building a robust converged network is costly, such a network enhances an enterprise's ability to reuse and repurpose content and deliver it quickly and cheaply. This goes a long way toward making the ROI for content creation and management more attractive.
But you need to recognize what you can and cannot control. While overprovisioning bandwidth facilitates content distribution on enterprise LANs, slow internetwork links beyond the firewall can degrade application performance and reduce QoS (quality of service). One answer: cold, hard cache that can reduce application latency, speed files to end users and cut the cost of transmitting content.
Cache servers pull content dynamically from origin servers, based on end-user requests, and maintain it. This speeds access to content in response to future requests, regardless of content type. When caches are used in conjunction with eCDNs (enterprise content-delivery networks), enterprises can even pre-position content on cache servers close to end users.
By streaming media to user desktops you can deliver high-quality enterprise video content, such as corporate communications and training, thus trimming your travel budget. Hardware-based MPEG encoders or software encoders with streaming servers deliver video, while MPEG servers transmit full-motion video from a meeting to the desktop.
Finally, unified messaging brings the concept of digital convergence to your IP network by combining e-mail, fax and voicemail into a single message store and providing a single point of administration and management. This reduces IT support costs and keeps employees in tune with customers by letting them access their inboxes from multiple devices.
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