What's In The Name?

People need to talk. For a while, despite good intentions, technology had

actually become a barrier to fulfilling that basic need of people. The modern

human found himself torn between the love for a cellphone, the need for a

laptop, and the call of a persistently ringing POTS. In the end, whatever

conversation followed was in between the persistent calls from another

instrument. Much time was wasted trying to get connected, rather than in

communicating.

To add to the complexity, there came IP communications and even multimedia

communication solutions. The focus in today's communications field, therefore,

is to free the user some of the complexity of managing the tools of

communications and to just let the users talk and communicate.

Enter Unified Communications



Unified communications (UC) offer the ability to improve how the individuals,
groups and companies interact and perform tasks. It attempts to this by allowing

multiple communication channels to be coordinated.

On a networking level, in some simple implementations, this may be achieved

by consolidating separate servers, but more frequently, UC adds value to

existing communications servers by running the UC application over the IP

infrastructure. UC's key components are: an IP PBX, VoIP, presence, e-mail,

audio and Web conferencing, voice mail, unified messaging and instant messaging

(IM).

Vinod Sindigi, assistant manager, Marketing, ABS India says, “UC packages

and solutions are extension of PBX solutions. With the UC, the capabilities of

PBX are enhanced.”

Rajesh Shetty, regional manager, ITS, Cisco, India and SAARC, says, “UC is

a combination of many technologies, IP PBX is one. But over and above, it is

about how various people can access various types of communications from one

device.”

All the components of UC have been around for a while now, but as KVSSS

Gunneswara Rao, director, VoIP, D-Link India puts it, “The unified

communications fabric gets the results for the companies with end-to-end IP

Telephony, messaging, networking, contact center, customer management, and much

more.”

At the very basic, unified communications can mean integrating voicemail on

an e-mail server. Bill Korbe, director, Product Management (VoIP), Ensim,

elaborates, “Unified communications provides integrated messages in a single

in-box (voice, fax, email, images and video). But most of the time it is used in

the context of integrating voicemail and e-mail.”

Its real value to the company is that every user can access all the

communication meant for him, irrespective of the access technology or the

medium.

Names Don't Matter



It was multimedia communications some time ago, now it is called unified
communications, and other terminologies are already doing the rounds, such as

intelligent communications. However, with all these evolutions, the

communications setup has evolved.

According to Dhananjay Ganjoo, director, Sales and Channel, Nortel India, “To

begin with, we had reactive networks, then we had proactive networks, with UC

the network can become anticipatory.”

Dinesh Sehgal, head, Convergence Business Unit, Avaya Global Connect says,

“UC can be seen from the network side where we integrate some technologies or

applications, but this may or may not have an implication on the business

processes per se. The important question today is, how to create applications

for intelligent infrastructure, which means applications like ERP CRM, going on

one part of the network need to be integrated on voice communications or the

vice versa.” When the communications system understands and caters to these

needs, we can say it is an intelligent, rather than just a unified

communications system. Of course, all vendors are likely to say that their

offering is intelligent, no matter what it is called.

Many others talk about UC as an application that enables activities such as

collaboration, voice and video/Web conferencing and rich messaging, which would

include sharing of screens (all members of a conference being able to see a

slide that the presenter wants) and websites with each other.

Who Likes It



All kinds of organizations can benefit from it. Sehgal goes on to include
managing insurance agents and medical representatives in the list.



The others in the industry are still going for the low-hanging fruits, as Ganjoo
puts it, “The early adopters were the IT workers, they were the low hanging

fruit, they saw the immediate benefit of combining VoIP, video and collaboration

under one tool and one screen rather than over diverse applications that people

had been using so far.”

The Recipe



The most important ingredient of a UC solution is 'need'. Therefore, even
before the organization goes about trying to get the new technology, it needs to

assess across all its employees, mobile workers, desk bound, or working from

home-do they really need unify all or some of their communications over and

above the existing communications set up? Sindigi exclaims, “UC will evolve as

a business enhancer tool only when there is a real requirement.” Without that,

clearly, no employee will make the effort for learning the new application.

For this,. Rao says, the organization must “perform an electronic network

assessment that includes utilization and network statistics, check network

performance specifications, estimate the bandwidth requirements, have a strong

knowledge of both data and voice networks and appropriate IT support and choose

a scalable network infrastructure that will grow with your business.”

	“The unified communications fabric gets the results for the companies” -KVSSS Gunneswara Rao, director, VoIP, D-Link		“The impact UC will have on the business will depend on the ability to correlate use to productivity gains.” -Yugal Sharma, country manager, India & SAARC, Polycom
	“To begin with, we had reactive networks, then we had proactive networks, now they are anticipatory” -Dhananjay Ganjoo, director, Sales and Channel, Nortel India		“UC will evolve as a business enhancer tool only when there is a real requirement.” -Vinod Sindigi, assistant manager, Marketing, ABS

On the networking side, Korbe says, “The voicemail solution simply needs to

be able to forward your VMs to your e-mail system as e-mail audio attachments.”

This can be done by upgrading the VM solution or by obtaining a new

communication system that includes VM that supports UC. That is where the IP PBX

comes in.

The IP PBX is not an absolute must for UC, but, as Shetty says, “An IP PBX

removes the complexity of the proprietary TDM hardware, and makes a PBX open

standard based and work on open technology.” Besides the IP PBX, UC has other

components and communications media too, and it is only their combined result

that can be called UC. It is important to note that, IP PBX per se won't have

unified communication build into it, there will be a need for a separate

software to unify all the various communications channels and technologies.

For an implementation like this, an organization will need, besides an IP

infrastructure, an e-mail system, like Microsoft exchange. It will also need a

voicemail solution on the IP PBX. And, the voicemails will have to be stored in

the message store, along with the e-mails, as well as the faxes. With that in

place, e-mails can come to the PC in a normal way, the UC software will make

that voicemail also available on the PC in the same e-mail client. Similarly,

fax will be converted into a scan and sent in an e-mail. To access these from a

phone, voicemail system will ensure that the e-mails are read out to the user.

According to Yugal Sharma, country manager, India & SAARC, Polycom, there

needs to be a network that can carry the payloads that UC creates. While WiMAX

and UMTS would seem mandatory for UC, given India's archaic regulatory norms,

which disallow convergence of IP and PSTN communication, all that one needs is a

broadband connection. In any case, bandwidth is not an issue within an

organization. And if a user wants to access this solution from outside the

office network, a broadband connection is enough. When queried, Sehgal refused

to conced that lack of infrastructure or bandwidth is an issue. Sehgal says that

he has comfortably used his corporate UC solution successfully over public

hotspots, and over 512 and 256 kbps from his home. Over this connection, he can

easily take phones landing on his office extension (from outside India), and

except video, can use almost all the other functionalities of the UC solution.

Solutions like MCS 5100 from Nortel and Siemens OpenScape bring all the

functionalities and applications of the solution under a single solution, which

enable users to collaborate with applications like voice, video, and screen

sharing. And they can still access resources like e-mail and voicemail from non-UC

specified equipment like POTS.

UC being a solution encompassing many solutions, vendors are collaborating

with each other to ensure interoperability. In an ideal world, based on

completely open standards (like SIP), this should not be an issue. Still vendors

like Microsoft and Nortel are collaborating to ensure the Microsoft's LCS and

Nortel's MCS interoperate, and Avaya and Nokia are also collaborating to bring

out handhelds.

The Costs



Hyped as UC is, Korbe says, at least in the US, “It often comes bundled with
newer technology solutions like IP-Centrex, IP-PBX.” So the cost or the effort

of deploying it could be a part of the effort an investment that goes into

deploying the IP infrastructure in an organization.

Still, excellent UC products are also offered by Polycom, IBM, Cisco and as

these can all work on most IP infrastructures, so users can leverage on existing

IP hardware if their older solutions don't offer UC.

Depending on the requirements that a customer makes, the cost can vary,

because individual features will have to be enabled and depending on the

functionalities demanded, appropriate terminals would have their own associated

costs, which can vary over a great range.

While most vendors calculate the costs after receiving the requirements of

the customer, in India, Nortel has ventured ahead of the market with three

packages, which can give a 100 user deployment for anything between $30,000 and

about $60,000. While that may sound steep for 100 users, it offers all

additional ports at $65 a piece, irrespective of the complexity and the richness

of the features that were chosen for the first 100 users.

Also, currently, only the big organizations are going for it in India, and

over a base of 2000+ employees, the upfront cost of the UC solution may not be

too steep. Smaller organizations may have to wait for service providers to

introduce these services over IP Centrex solutions.

While an organization may feel confident that its IP infrastructure is in

place, it may still have to upgrade it to allow UC its full utilization. Rao

points out, “As data is not as time sensitive as compared to voice or video,

earlier network architectures, and the network infrastructure developers have

not focused on QoS, reliability, always on and access, and 'right feed and

speed'.” Of course, solutions exist for this issue, but for organizations

with older IP infrastructure, this is also an additional cost.

Financial justifications for UC still come in soft RoIs like productivity,

but the market for it is still growing. Ganjoo estimates that the market for UC

could be around $140 mn by the end of this year.

Sharma says, “If the organization has not already deployed UC, start with a

small set of technically advanced users or one department, such as research and

development, customer service or field sales. This will allow the IT department

to develop training programs and understand the impact on the user community.”

He adds, that the impact UC will have on the business will depend on the ability

to correlate use to productivity gains. Therefore, developing key performance

metrics around use and productivity of the solution would be vital at this

stage.

Impediments



UC, if it is viewed as more than an integration of voicemail and e-mail, can
only move as fast as the adoption of IP in India. So the biggest hurdle in its

path is adoption of the parent technology. Then there are regulatory issues, and

almost all vendors agree that the full benefits of UC (or any other IP

technology) can only be had if convergence of PSTN is allowed with data

networks.

Regulatory hurdles also take a toll. Today, Avaya's EC 500 can potentially

trace a contact and reach him on a device of choice, wherever he is in the

world. However, the costs of doing that are immense, as the companies cannot

utilize their legitimately acquired resources. So, while a Cisco manager may be

contacted by customers in the US over a call manager on his PC, his customers in

India are forced to call him over a PSTN link. Expensive as the IP and UC

technologies are to roll out, the cost of long distance PSTN only adds to its

cost and cumbersome manageability. The consensus has therefore developed in the

industry that full convergence will promote all IP technologies, and UC will

also benefit from it.

Alok Singh