National Institutes of Health seek RFI for major Unified Communications project

The federal government is making a concentrated effort to cut its communications costs, looking to unified communications solutions, VoIP and a variety of web, voice and video collaboration solutions to hulp it cut billions from its budgets.

This week, the U.S. National Institutes of Health issued an RFI to help it evaluate unified communications tools and products to add to the NIH Enterprise Architecture and enterprise standard technologies.

The NIH, which consists of 27 different institutes and centers, said it currently uses a mix of different vendors and technologies to provide communications capabilities to its staff. Some of these capabilities are provided by a staff member's local institute or center, while other capabilities are provided centrally by the NIH. These technologies are generally not unified. It said each has their own unified communications requirements.

"While recognizing that no one technology would be appropriate for the NIH (at this time)," the NIH RFI said, "we are looking for unified communications technologies that would work well within this diverse environment and be able to integrate well with a wide variety of legacy systems."

The NIH specifically is looking at voice and telephony products; voice, video and web conferencing; and email, voice mail and unified messaging.

The NIH laid out the scope of this technical domain as products (equipment, software and services) that facilitate the use of multiple enterprise communication methods including Internet Protocol (IP)-PBX, voice over IP (VoIP), presence, e-mail, audioconferencing and Web conferencing, videoconferencing, voice mail, unified messaging (UM), instant messaging (IM) and various forms of mobility.

Evaluation criteria include:

• Estimated total cost of ownership
• NIH experience with the technology and the use and adoption of the standard throughout NIH
• Fit with existing NIH standards, technologies, and systems
• The breadth of the standard's applicability to multiple NIH stakeholder classes
• The level of effort and complexity associated with the implementation of the product in a production environment
• The use and adoption of the standard throughout industry in general (both commercial and public enterprises)
• The effort and specialized skill sets required to support a technology
• The product life cycle
• The ability and/or effectiveness and fit of the technology within the NIH security environment
• Strategic value/features and functionality
• The health of the product vendor in terms of its stability, projected longevity, and likelihood it will exist in the future to support the product and later versions of the product.

For more:
- see the NIH RFI

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