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The voice solutions industry has come up as an attractive destination to invest, following innovative strategies. Because of positive user experiences and heavy promotions by leading carriers and service providers, the demand for affordable and reliable home and small-to-medium business voice solutions has increased. The industry witnessed whooping 15% growth in FY12 with total voice solutions revenue accounting to `2,637 crore in FY12. Moving forward, cloud based voice solutions are likely to define the future of the communications industry in India.
The Growth Saga
The industry is growing with the help of server based, open standards, IP telephony, and UC and mobility based platforms. Avaya with 24% market share and revenue going up from `552 crore in FY11 to `624 crore in FY12 has shown promising growth.
In the last fiscal, the company has acquired large enterprise accounts to enhance and showcase its voice solution portfolio. Additionally, it also signed a multi-million dollar deal with Bharti, one of the largest global managed services deals. The company also registered substantial growth with many people shifting from simple voice mail to unified messaging solutions.
Second in line comes Cisco with 23% market share in the last fiscal. Next Alcatel-Lucent, which has again shown the expected performance with 15 % growth in FY12. Major hospitality chains have chosen Alcatel's technology for most of their properties in 2011. The company has delivered IP telephony solutions through room telephones, room automation, and integrating into ecosystem of hospitality technologies and vendors.
The latest entrant in the market is Coral Telecom. With negligible market share, the company has already bagged large export orders from a Norway company for niche market products. Another player, Actis, has also recently started its operations in voice solutions. The company is focusing on unified communications and IT telephony in a big way. It has also tied up with Microsoft for the same. According to the company, it has already bagged a few orders, especially in the government sector.
Cloud All the Way!
The possibilities of more processing power, better applications, faster networks, and reliable data storage are all converging in cloud. Cloud based voice solutions are gaining popularity among businesses as they not only reduce equipment costs, but also ensure greater reliability. These solutions including VoicePHP indicate the rising demand of cloud computing and this technology is expected to have more acceptance in the future.
The challenge remains to analyze how businesses can utilize the cloud for their benefits. With users becoming more mobile, organizations have already started moving towards voice over IP acceptability. They will continue to invest in Internet Protocol (IP) telephony platforms after mapping out telephony's role in a clear UC strategy.
As users' communication habits evolve, infrastructure and operations leaders need to consider new telephony and UC vendor relationships, as well as the use of managed services, outsourcing, hosted, and cloud based solutions. Employment of IP-PBXs will vary according to current investments, maturity of an organization's network infrastructure, and incumbent vendor strategy. The industry is viewing VoIP application as a potential cost saving technology as its adoption is likely to mitigate enterprises' operational costs.
While IP being accepted as the next wave in communication across all large enterprise segments, a major trend observed is that SMEs are also evaluating this technology and may prove to be a major growth driver in this segment in the short and medium-term. Apart from the growing demand in the enterprise space, the VoIP market has evolved in India. Even the small and medium business segments are also adopting and expanding their VoIP solutions.
The ongoing implementation of a fast, IP based cellular infrastructure is constantly dissolving the boundaries and the need for technology solutions to straddle them is also changing. The transformation to purely IP based high speed 4G networks is also yet another innovative change to look forward for.
Emerging Prospects
The enterprise voice market includes the provisioning of holistic voice communications for all wired and wireless users. Architectures include distributed on-premises solutions as well as centralized, virtualized, and hosted platforms which are essentially dedicated for use by a single organization.
The increasing trend towards audio-video integration in boardrooms with the help of open standards such as SIP, will be the next big wave. Convergence, leading to adoption of IP telephony with open standards by SMBs, increases demand for mobility solutions like fixed mobile convergence and growth in key verticals like infrastructure and telecom, the key factors driving voice solutions market in India. The SME sector has begun to widely adopt IT voice systems due to the cost advantage and appealing products. Along with SME adoption, the growth of unified communications has been very critical for the industry's growth. The growth of IT telephony has resulted in better voice clarity, integration with other communication systems, reduction in the use of cables, flexibility in use, and is also much more economical.