Real-Time with State Farm on Enterprise CommunicationsReal-Time with State Farm on Enterprise Communications

At this week's Oracle Industry Connect event, a State Farm senior network architect shared his perspective on cloud communications and more.

If you watched the recent NCAA March Madness tournament, then you probably saw more than a few of the State Farm Insurance "The Hoopers" commercials, quirky vignettes featuring an all-star family of misfits and their helpful "good neighbor." You may have scratched your head a bit on the first viewing or two, as did I. The messaging is simple enough, but the character mashups -- the head of Portland Trail Blazers Damian Lillard on a baby, for example -- are strikingly odd.

Humorous as the commercials are (see below), State Farm is quite serious about providing an exceptional customer experience. That, in part, falls on the shoulders of Douglas Zitkus, a senior network architect at State Farm who is focused on the company's strategy for communication services, including the contact center, voice and video communications, and collaboration.

During an IT thought leader panel discussion at Oracle Industry Connect yesterday, Zitkus shared his perspective from inside a large enterprise on a variety of hot enterprise communications topics.

Adoption of Cloud Communications Services
The adoption of cloud communications services is growing, and that's a good thing, but what that actually means varies by company size -- "there certainly is a division between small, medium, large, and very large enterprises," Zitkus said. "I happen to work for a very large enterprise, so the economics [aren't there.]" For very large enterprises, he added, the ROI still comes from on-premises, internally supported solutions.

For State Farm and other large enterprises, the cloud isn't a technical or engineering challenge, Zitkus said. "It's all about ROI and skilled resources within a company."

But except for that unique group, cloud UC makes a lot of sense, he said. "The right-sized businesses with the right circumstances will adopt it earlier rather than later... but eventually we're all going to adopt it."

Cloud and the Contact Center
Based on State Farm's own research and that of its peers, scalability of cloud contact center is an obstacle, Zitkus said. Say you need 200,000 endpoints: "There are certain cloud service providers that would argue, 'Yeah, we can support that,' but I think scale is still a big issue."

WebRTC in the Enterprise
As with cloud communications, the relevancy of WebRTC in the enterprise depends on the company's size, Zitkus said. "A certain number of large enterprises have money invested in the client/server solutions in place," so WebRTC isn't critical for them today. "But WebRTC in terms of a lifecycle of technology is a cheaper, easier, better, faster way to build this old mousetrap. I think adoption will continue to grow and develop, and it's going to be huge."

WebRTC is, in fact, on State Farm's roadmap, he added. "We have a lot of legacy systems that provide those same external and internal services today, so we have a capital investment. But we see it as a visionary, perhaps three to five years out, strategy that we will start using it." The biggest benefits will come for the company's external customers, with ease of launching real-time communications from any browser.

Noting that two years ago State Farm viewed WebRTC as being five years out, Zitkus said he thinks the technology is developing "at a reasonable pace, and that it will be consumable and adoptable in a few years."

Encryption for Real-Time Communications
"When it's made easy, where you can just toggle a switch or flip a setting and encryption works for real-time media and signaling, then that's when it will be adopted more," Zitkus said.

One day, the public switched telephone network (PSTN) is going to go away, but a couple of things need to happen before it does, he added. First, carriers have to intertwine their VoIP and SIP trunking networks, just as they've done with PSTN. While they're doing some of that interconnecting work, activity has been pretty slow to date, he said.

"And, in terms of security, as more and more real-time traffic, UC in particular, goes over these external IP networks then encryption will become even more important."

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