Hot Technologies: Unified Communications: Hot, but is it Happening?

For any enterprise trying to compete globally, seamless

communications is increasingly becoming the key to improving business processes.

Add to this, the convergence of communication technologies, and you get to the

hot new buzzword in the technology landscapeunified communications or UC.

While the market adoption of unified communications is currently

slow, trend watchers paint a bright future. The arrival of unified

communications signals the beginning of the convergence of VoIP telephony,

email, instant messaging, mobile communications, and audio-video Web

conferencing into a single platform that shares a common directory, and common

developer tools. UC also takes advantage of standard communication protocols

such as SIP (session initiation protocol) to route communications to right the

people on the right device.

This coming together of communications and technology presents a

lucrative market of close to $40 bn worldwide. Reasons for slow adoption of

technology are plenty. While some new technologies like Presence are not fully

understood, best practices around usage are not defined. Also, the product

integration is considered complex. Most important is the fact that the business

case usually becomes difficult to communicate, and is usually based on a soft

RoI.

A Gartner report released in June 2006, points out that the UC

market and its technology are maturing rapidly, but overall the market remains

at an early stage, and the adoption of converged solutions remains slow.

The communication patterns of most enterprises in the next three

to five years will be indicators to where the market is headed. While the

outlook is of a tremendous positive growth, there is no clear direction on how

it will mature.

Over 90% of enterprises that are converging data and voice are

currently on IP networks. In the next two to three years, the transition will

happen from IP- based networks, and also organizations will look at integrating

the email infrastructure too. While the PBX infrastructure in India is close to

$290 mn, eventually, the market will move towards IP- based infrastructure,

which is close to a $108 mn market.

The largest single value of unified communications lies in its

ability to reduce human latency in business processes. Historically,

companies have expected significant employee productivity improvements by

offering employees a unified message box to access email, voice mail, SMS,

teletex, and fax from multiple points of interaction. The POIs are fixed phones,

mobile or cellular phones, PCs, and PDAs.

The market size approximations (for 2003-07) have been divided

into three segments: enterprise sales ($100-200 mn), service provider products

($100-200 mn), and service provider services ($300-500 mn). Across these

segments, a transformation in technology is taking place that promises to fill

the value gap that currently exists in systems. This transformation is the

evolution of UM (Unified Messaging) to UC. The new features in UC are making the

business case more compelling.

Urvashi Kaul



urvashik@cybermedia.co.in