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