The computing and the telecommunications industries have been talking about their imminent marriage for a long, long time. But somehow, the dream has never quite been realised. The two worlds of two-way, real-time voice calls on the one hand, and information processing and management on the other, have become tangled but have never quite merged.

That continued separation - in technologies, vocabulary, business models - has cost the IT business consumer dearly. Fixed voice calls, mobile calls, emails, video links, broadcast - all these communications channels remain essentially separate. Coupled with the fact that IT applications themselves are usually less integrated than they could be, and it is no surprise that electronic communication has become dysfunctional.

"Communications, sometimes referred to as 'the great liberator of our age', is gradually turning it into an era of inefficiency," said communications consultancy Xierus in a recent report, The era of over communications. Many of the gains resulting from increased function and mobility are being lost because users are distracted and overwhelmed by the need to mentally integrate overlapping and competing systems.

Until now, no amount of preaching, forecasting or investment has been enough to force the issue of convergence. Computer companies have bought telecoms companies, telecoms companies have bought computer makers, and services companies from both camps have attempted to bridge the divide with creative programming.

Many have produced innovative technologies, and some customers have implemented them, but none has managed to deliver to its customers or its shareholders the kind of compelling advances that convergence has always promised.

Instead, the two industries have developed alongside each other: IT has become ubiquitous, with intelligence and processing power distributed around the globe and across the Internet; voice and video communications, meanwhile, have advanced at the same furious pace, but their circuits, mobile or fixed, have been largely closed off to the powerful, sometimes anarchic, but clearly liberating world of open, digital computing.

Revolution

Over the next five to 10 years, all that is set to change dramatically and irrevocably. The worlds of computing and telecommunications - and that ultimately includes mobile and broadcasting too - will all move onto one common, open and programmable infrastructure. While there will continue to be a patchwork of underlying transport mechanisms, all the services that run across these networks will be based on standard, manageable packets of information using the Internet protocol (IP).

Above this, new standard sets, such as the SIP (session initiation protocol) and IMS (IP multimedia subsystem) will enable all IT companies - from both sides of the old computing/telecoms divide - to build, distribute and manage a wide range of integrated services that work smoothly together.

Some of the implications of this can already be seen in the kind of services that the Internet and IP-based communications of 2005 are able to offer. But far greater, more profound implications are to come.

"This is not about voice over the Internet, or about replacing PBX [private telephone exchanges]. This is about a phased migration from one world to another," says Steve Masters, general manager, IP Infrastructure, for BT Global Services, which has a huge commitment to this new order. "The implications will be profound. Everything will be more efficient and cost effective."

"In terms of this being an important development to the enterprise, I think this is actually being underplayed at the moment," says Jerry Caron, principle telecoms analyst with research company Current Analysis. Apart from the opportunities to cut costs through integrating services, a swathe of new applications and services, empowered with voice, video and presence technology, will soon appear (see table, Converged communications).

All of these will ultimately be based on a new, unified communications base, provided by service providers and sometimes, but perhaps less and less, built in-house on standard components.

The goal of the providers, says Neil Sutton, general manager, IT Services for BT, will be to build and offer near ubiquitous networks that are always available, are high bandwidth, secure, cost effective and manageable, and are layered with services - such as the ability to sense 'presence'. Their ease of use and openness will belie their underlying complexity.

Analysts agree that, this time, convergence is no false start. Major telecoms companies around the world are taking risky and irrevocable steps, rebuilding their infrastructure and business models, and broadcasters are preparing to do the same. In the UK, BT's £10 billion investment in its new IP-based 21st century network (21CN) is an example of the scale of the changes being made (see page 14).

"Part of 21CN is a realisation that 15 years from now, BT will not be a carrier. It will be an application integrator," says Caron. BT is ahead, but all providers will have to make similar commitments or establish their strategy, he says.

Kai-Uwe Ricke, CEO of German operator Deutsche Telekom (DT), is certainly thinking along the same lines, as are all of the former national telcos (see page 12). "It is the services surrounding the provision of telephone calls, such as billing and service level guarantees, that will bring these companies their revenue, not selling telephone call minutes." For the mobile service providers, the implications are equally profound.

Although at present they are wedded to a business model based on minutes of connection time, several are preparing to put in the infrastructure to offer advanced, integrated services - including, eventually, voice-over-IP (VoIP). Others are examining the implications.

"The world will move to IMS," says Paul Mankiewich, chief technology officer for mobility at Bell Labs, the research arm of telecoms equipment provider Lucent Technologies, referring to the open, IP multimedia system that will enable operators to deliver integrated IP services over their networks.

A recent report by Analysys, a telecoms consultancy, concluded that most mobile operators will install an IMS within five years. "And our advice to them is to move to SIP as fast as you can," says Mankiewich. SIP gives the system the ability to sense a user's 'presence' on the network and to tailor services according to the device they are using.

For the enterprise customer, the choices are no less important. Tactical implementations to install VoIP, for example, may fail to adequately support more advanced collaborative applications. "It is important to have a roadmap, a cunning plan," says Sutton. BT itself advocates a strategy that moves from consolidation (of both equipment and services), through convergence, and finally to new, extended applications. In each case, it argues, there is a clear financial case for investing.

Gartner, the IT advisory company, has warned that the convergence of email, instant messaging, and fixed and mobile voice services will overwhelm CIOs that do not plan for this change: "We're talking about a complete change in role; businesses are going to need a communications czar or some kind of chief process officer to manage this," Neil Rickard told a recent Gartner Symposium.

This may be the most important first step. The changes in the next ten years may prove as disruptive as the Internet has in the past ten.