Unified communications segment has risen to the forefront in the recent
months, thanks to the ongoing economic turbulence. Organizations were forced to
curtail unnecessary expenses, and adopt technologies enabling corporations to
work seamlessly irrespective of the geographical locations.
According to a research report from Wainhouse Research, the unified
communications industry will grow to $30 bn in just five years. While the market
will actually experience negative compound annual growth on the product side, it
will be mitigated by a robust positive growth.
2009 saw an increase in the adoption of UC technologies by enterprises for
business continuity. Although, there has been a significant exposure to advanced
UC technologies due to recession and other factors, basic IP telephony (both
greenfield and replacement) has still dominated the market, followed by the
growing deployments of rich media collaboration (audio/video/web conferencing;
mobility solutions that allow for fixed mobile convergence delivering single
number reach/single mailbox; digital media delivery; and presence solutions.
Expert Panel |
Rajesh Thakur, associate VP, India Business, HCL |
Technology In Demand
Over the last one year, hosted contact center offerings are driving the
adoption of UC in the mid market enterprises, while the larger enterprises are
largely influenced by private and customized deployment of collaboration
technologies.
Video conferencing was largely adopted by enterprises for eliminating the
need for face-to-face business meetings or travel related expenses. In addition
to this, adoption of videoconferencing helped organizations reduce their carbon
footprint, and become more environmentally responsible.
Traditional communication vendors embraced IP telephony as the future
standard for enterprise communications. Along with the advantages of flexibility
given to the end users, IP telephony allows them to reduce the cost by combining
their voice and data networks, and has additional managerial benefits.
The dominance of conventional communication environments where end users have
a separate email client, instant messaging client, desktop telephone, fax
machine and browser based conferencing capabilities will eventually reduce and
UC will take the center stage.
Tips For CIOs
|
Enterprises are now increasingly relying on collaborative, multi-modal
electronic communications between employees, customers and partners. With
heightened emphasis on security and compliance, enterprises are seeking
standard, flexible and policy based solutions that they can use to consistently
manage, enforce and audit access to their infrastructure.
Today, enterprises are looking forward to leading edge technology, on-demand
conferences, flexible deployment, common management suites, highly scalable
solutions, secure VoIP conferencing, embedded multi-points options and more
videoconferencing.
Major players in this space are ready to introduce new technologies in the UC
portfolio. Cisco has recently introduced technologies like Intercompany Media
Engine, Unified Presence 8.0, Unified Communication Manager 8.0, Show and Share,
Enterprise Collaboration Platform, and Pulse.
Some new technologies that HCL Comnet is to come up with include affordable
enterprise/hosted telepresence solutions, applications that ride on UC
deployments to add tropical value by integrating with the organizations's
application services infrastructure like CRM, building management system, next
generation digital media delivery for retail, education and enterprises.
Enterprise Concerns
Employee expectations along with the competitive environment have put an
increasing pressure on business executives to quickly embrace collaborative
processes and tools. But current technology alternatives are difficult to deploy
and integrate. Most have long deployment cycles, don't scale to mobile
workspace, and lack business controls.
As a result, people can't connect and communicate across firewalls or
corporate boundaries. This leaves companies with the challenge of how to combine
the reach, speed and flexibility of web 2.0 tools without compromising on
security, reliability and policy of their networks.
According to leading players in the UC space, the major demand from CIOs has
been de-clutter and breakdown of the UC concept in practical, predictable
initiatives. CIOs are demanding that solutions offered to them address specific
business needs, clearly demonstrate RoI, and be both scalable and flexible.
Another demand is to make enterprise communication system robust, secure and
survivable. Deployment and operation cost have always been focal concerns of
CIOs apart from RoI figures. CIOs are demanding engagement models based on
controlling and lowering of the enterprise costs.
The advent of UC will pose a number of significant challenges. It is evident
that UC enhances business processes, but it also poses challenges like:
- One of the largest challenges in the UC implementation is application
performance, which is of utmost importance as it directly affects the end
user's experience. - Another big challenge is the availability of skilled labor for supporting
the network infrastructure and troubleshooting. - Interoperability of UC solution like in the case of videoconferencing
being compatible with similar other party products. - Scarcity of bandwidth is another hiccup in the smooth functioning of the
UC solutions. - Need to streamline information delivery, and maximize the value of
existing/planned IT infrastructure. - An increasingly mobile workspace making it necessary to build a strong
communication system for ensuring inter-employee productivity. - Business processes mandating the need for teams to collaborate across
functions, organizations and geographies. - High communication costs, multiple communication service providers, and
difficult charge back.
Organizations are concerned about the ambiguity in government regulations,
especially regarding rich media communications on private WAN and integration
with public telecom infrastructure. Also the inability to seamlessly integrate
dual mode devices over public cloud is a concern and a stumbling block for UC
deployments.
The Green Edge
Some early adopters of UC have already reported a worldwide 20% reduction in
their travel cost due to the usage of advanced videoconferencing technologies.
It is a great way to reduce enterprise costs and employee fatigue while lowering
carbon footprint significantly. Deploying compact consolidated UC solutions help
organizations save power and cooling resources vis-Ã -vis traditional analog
environments.
Advanced collaboration technologies like telepresence and WebEx are helping
organizations reduce their carbon footprint and variable cost by allowing them
to conduct rich experience meetings and seminars.
THE UC ADVANTAGE
|
Server consolidation and virtualization can reduce the space necessary for
servers, PCs and storage equipment; and allow to tap into the roughly 85% of
computing capacity commonly left unused. Cloud based computing and applications
save investment in costly equipments associated operational expenses, and can
scale to meet the fluctuating demands of the business.
Focus Verticals
All organizations today are looking to optimize their operations, and
collaborate more effectively. Naturally, the larger the organization, the
greater the benefit that can be gained from the deployment of collaboration
tools. But all organizations that focus on technology usage to improve
collaboration can realize the benefits. However, major verticals include
finance, retail, government, education, manufacturing, healthcare and energy
apart from the IT sector which has been one of the early adopters of UC.
A lot of traction can be seen from cross-vertical of start-ups and new age
enterprises especially in the retail, media and service industries. These highly
mobile organizations depend almost entirely on their communication
infrastructure to do everyday business, and the UC industry is nurturing a
highly symbiotic relationship with these industries.
Also with approximately 50-60% of IT spend in the country expected to come
from the flourishing SMB segment, it is clear that there is a huge market
waiting out there to be tapped, and companies are focused on addressing it.
Adoption Scenario
Green IT and its emergence will propel the growth of UC within global and
country-wide enterprises. Organizations will be more open to the concept of UC.
Use of conferencing facilities will reduce the commute time and long distance
travel giving rise to emerging technologies like WebEx and telepresence.
With the increasing globalization and thinner time boundaries, presence
functionality will play an important role in communication solutions. Today,
with increasing number of touch-points such as multiple phones, email, SMS,
instant messaging, the work force is increasingly getting closer and
geographical boundaries cease to exist.
Rise in web 2.0 technologies and proliferation of social networking websites
have increased so much that Twitter and Facebook conversations have become more
real-time than emails.
The Coming Years
As the Indian companies grow bigger and expand globally, it will be
imperative for enterprises to deploy UC to enhance productivity and reduce
costs. It will enable new capabilities such as effective business
communications, employee mobility, streamlining business processes and improving
profitability. Indian organizations are beginning to realize that they will be
left behind if they don't make a decision on UC as this is the future.
It is expected that UC adoption will happen in the overlapping stages. In the
next three years, a lot of large deployments of UC technologies will enable
collaboration from across verticals, with major buyers being BFSI and
government. This will be followed by small enterprises' UC revolution that will
include a lot of opportunities on innovative, and flexible UC deployments across
thousands of enterprises through hosted UC models.
Arpita Prem
arpitap@cybermedia.co.in