Unified Communications : This is the Future

In today's dynamic business environment, the most important benefit comes

from having a communications system that can change and grow at a moment's

notice. Enabling new capabilities for more effective business communications,

employee mobility, streamlining business processes and improving profitability.

In this scenario, unified communications is gradually gaining momentum as

enterprises continue to invest in leading edge communication technologies,

scalable infrastructure, common management suites as well as secure voice and

videoconferencing.

With recession looming large, more companies will now be looking at unified

communications technologies such as video and web conferencing/collaboration as

a way to reduce travel expenses, at the same time being eco-friendly.

According to a Frost & Sullivan forecast on unified communications in India,

the total market size is around $670 mn (2008) and likely to grow to more than

$1bn by 2010. Majority of this includes enterprise IP telephony; and

applications like presence, mobility, conferencing and collaboration make up

around 10%.

Key Trends



The scope of unified communications in India is tremendous. Significant

trends have been observed across industries like hospitality, IT/BPO, banking

and financial services, telecom, etc. There has been impressive increase in the

percentage of deployment of unified communications products and applications.

With the emergence of virtualization, embedded software on open platform and

the software-as-a-service model (SaaS) model, there is increased focus on

services and applications delivered over a robust network infrastructure.

Communication-as-a-Service (CaaS) is a logical extension to the SaaS model

with hosted unified communications solution on a service providers' network. IP

telephony hardware is hosted at the third party data center and the user is

provided access to assets on a monthly rental basis.

Companies will go beyond the initial capabilities of IM, like click-to-call

and online presence, to deep integration with business processes and line of

business applications.

Hottest Technologies



Some technologies which are already available in the Indian market are IP

telephony, unified messaging, video telephony, audio/video/web conferencing,

collaboration solutions, instant messaging and customer contact services, all

integrated with each other and with the messaging and business applications. But

the unified communications market in India is ready to adopt new technologies,

which will give further boost to this segment.

Video streaming and rich media technology is the next wave and give users the

ability to hear or view a file in real time, without downloading it first. Other

new technologies which are being launched are presence or location based

services using the SIP protocol and tele presence. Enterprise mobility is

another application which is going to see a lot of action in the coming days

with the launch of clients for cellular phones which provide all unified

communications applications for a mobile workforce.

Experts panel

Minhaj Zia, national sales manager, unified communications, Cisco India & Saarc Sanjay Virnave, president, Sales, Tulip Telecom Natarajan S , VP, R&D, D-Link India Vivek Prowal, BU head, unified communications, Avaya GlobalConnect Shailendra Badoni, COO, Datacraft India Raghunath Vijayaraghavan , marketing director, Bay Talkitec Sukhvinder Ahuja, director, sales, Nortel India

Communication enabled business processes and further enhancement of

Intelligent Presence Aggregation are two of the most interesting technologies

that companies can look forward to in the near future. Some of the other

upcoming technology advancements are:

• Hosted Setups: Completely outsourced or hosted pay will definitely have a
  
  substantial role to play in this regard. Context based offerings by service
  
  providers spread across a base of customers reduces capex as well as opex
  
  charges.
• Open Platforms: Enterprises are gradually moving toward open platforms,
  
  direct benefits being ease of migration, customizations, integration across
  
  diversified tech points and applications, and a substantially low total cost
  
  of ownership.
• Location Based Services: Roll-out of GPS linkages to applications like
  
  Location based services
• New Businesses Processes: Increase in First Contact Resolution (FCR) for
  
  contact centers.

Blooming Sectors



The present scenario sees a huge growth in the telecom sector as telcos

continue their efforts to maintain the customer base by offering good customer

interaction experiences via voice, SMS, email, web and video. In India there is

tremendous potential in some verticals like BFSI, contact centers and the SME

segment.

Besides the IT/BPO segment, hospitality, manufacturing, tier-2 and -3 cities,

retail and the government space have a large potential for unified

communications implementation. The volatile economic environment has spurred

corporates to maximize operational efficiency by cutting costs, hence a unified

communications solution is a boon at this time.

Bright Future



This year comes with enormous challenges. Enterprises are definitely not

willing to replace the existing infrastructure, and are looking at adding

unified communications components in a way that they provide interoperability,

afford ability through an opex model as well as provide the unified

communications promise.

Organizations are beginning to realize that they will be left behind if they

don't make a decision on unified communications-as this is the future.

Arpita Prem



arpitap@cybermedia.co.in