Unified Communication Gains Ground

By Krishna Mukherjee

Over the years, the prowess of Unified Communications (UC) has been realized by most of the enterprises, this new form of communication not only integrates messaging into the business flow but it has countless other advantages that help in increasing the productivity of enterprises.

UC creates powerful connections between people both inside and outside of organization. It combines presence and availability with voice, video, email and instant messaging, to enable communication with employees, customers, and suppliers while streamlining business processes that helps in saving money and time and thus, increases the productivity of enterprises.

Having said that, there are challenges such as security and interoperability turning off a majority of enterprises, which are refraining from deploying unified communication enterprise solutions. Voice&Data, in this special report, explores its pros and cons and the reasons for its slow deployment.

Many plus points

A number of organizations, both large and small, today understand the power of UC which helps streamline their business processes and boost productivity, reliability, and competitiveness. This awareness is pushing sales for UC in India and globally.

It is because of its several advantages that currently, 52% Indian firms support UC applications while 26% are planning to adopt them in the next two years and it is estimated that 44% of Indian enterprises plan to invest in mobilizing UC.

According to a research, the size of the unified communication market in India was $465 mn in 2010, and it is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11% till 2017 with increased adoption by SMBs. On an average, since 2010 segment-wise, conferencing and collaboration is growing over 30% Y-o-Y, messaging over 50 % and mobility over 15 % and unified client, presence and integrated applications close to 20%.

The uptake is attributed to doing away with the limitation of real-time communication by integrating all communication needs such as voicemails, emails, fax, especially, data access and video conferencing –apt for a mobile workforce.

According to a report by Frost and Sullivan, unified communications technologies adoption in India is set to change with adjustments in India’s telecom policy. The segments of the market researched and published in this market insight are hosted services for audio, video, web conferencing, call center, email, and voice.

Technology company Persistent Systems was able to reduce the management efforts and infrastructure cost by 30% by deploying Cisco WebEx Social – an enterprise collaboration platform that combines the power of social networking, content creation, and real-time communications. Webex Social allowed Persistent to merge disparate collaboration platforms and helped it to reduce time spent on management and execution of events by 20%.

Prashant Gupta, head of solutions-India at Verizon Enterprise Solutions, says: “Unified communications is not just about integrating communication applications on to a common IP platform. It necessitates a whole new CIO mindset that sees business communication as a strategic tool for meeting business goals. It transforms commonplace business applications into smart intuitive collaborative environments for instant decision-making and fast turnaround.”

Adoption curve rises

UC is holding significance across every vertical today whether it is Internet technology (IT) services; banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI); media, retail; and manufacturing.

Some of the major trends in enterprise unified communications are workforce mobility, mobile connectivity, boom in industry verticals, the need for ubiquitous video conferencing, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), etc.

In the education sector, BITS Pilani is using Cisco TelePresence technology that has built a virtual lecture facility that can connect its four campuses and enable all students, regardless of location, to collaborate and participate. The initiative will benefit over 11,000 students and 700 teachers and provide them with access to business leaders and guest lecturers located around the globe, enabling collaborative research and interactive learning a routine part of their lives.

The education sector is expected to continue to spend on the communications infrastructure, especially in developing economies like India and the educational institutes in that region.

At the same time, industries especially hospitality, health-are are increasingly adopting video-conferencing as a business service to cater to distant clients and increase customer satisfaction.

Experts say UC applications improve work flow and collaboration between clinicians and administrative staff, yielding increased productivity and efficiency. And all communication can be stored and archived to the cloud to become part of the patient’s record for future use.

“We believe our key achievements in India have been to grow the video-collaboration market, by creating competitive solutions that continue to cater to the emerging trends in the market and we will continue on the same route in terms of developing future-ready solutions,” says Minhaj Zia, managing director, Polycom India and Saarc.

“As companies expand geographically there will be a strong demand for a global network reach, including unified dialing plans and singular infrastructures across all regions. Enterprises are always looking to reduce their capital expenditures but the focus, this year, will shift from purely saving money to increasing productivity. This means applications will have to work together as one,” says Ravi Sundararajan, chief operating officer, GupShup.

Challenges

However, enterprises continue to wrestle with moving their deployment from pilot phase into full-scale production. Sanjay Sharma, regional vice president and head for South West Asia Region at Amdocs, says: “There are multiple challenges in deploying a unified communications solution. For example, enterprise UC solutions are often platform-specific and the biggest challenge is the need to standardize and interoperate across many different technologies under the same hood. Some solutions still require dedicated hardware and cannot run in virtualized environments for use cases such a video conferencing.”

As far as the interoperability issue is concerned, not all phones, soft phones, gateways, call managers are interoperable as they support some proprietary variant of a standard protocol. This limits enterprises from a free mix-and-match of components.

Experts believe that there is a greater use of soft phone technology as collaboration is taking place more and more on laptops, tablets and overall mobile devices. As IT departments look to optimize their enterprise voice networks they can’t just migrate fully to soft phones.

“There is a big cultural shift that has to happen within their communities first before migration from hard phones to soft phones takes place. The legacy hard phones will still be hanging around on corporate desktops to some extent until the industry-wide migration to unified communication is complete,” says Sundararajan.

Manoj Khilnani, country marketing head-enterprise, BlackBerry India, stresses on the security aspect of UC deployment as security is a key concern for enterprises dealing with sensitive data. It is critical for enterprises to develop sound security practices around mobile unified communications in the wake of BYOD trend. “The key to a successful mobile UC deployment is finding a solution that is BYOD ready – a solution that maximizes the benefits of BYOD, while eliminating the challenges of data leak and security concerns,” he says.

CIOs and IT practitioners should try and achieve a higher level of control and security across all platforms and devices, all managed through a single administration console. Managed applications are secured and separated from personal apps and data, providing an integrated email, calendar and contacts app, an enterprise-level secure browser and secure attachment viewing and editing options, Khilnani adds.

According to Sarvesh Goorha, CIO, iYogi, infrastructure readiness and system integration are the other challenges on UC deployment. Most of the network has been built over the years and is heterogeneous in nature. Therefore, any new deployment will require upgrade or migrations to new versions which leads to impact on cost, time and manpower.

Besides, existing business critical applications may not be compatible or may require version changes or migration efforts leading to additional cost, time and possible downtime.

While organizations find innovative ways to use hybrid solutions and achieve phased implementation of unified communication, to address the demand from end customers and internal stake holders, the cost and time requirements continue to pose the biggest bottleneck in its widespread adoption.