Transforming India through Unified Communications

The complexity of today's business environment is nothing short of remarkable. Global workforces, deeply intertwined supply chains, e-commerce, pervasive mobility, and social media have radically transformed the workplace and served up enormous and growing communication challenges. Many organizations and their CIOs are struggling to enable comprehensive and seamless collaboration across platforms, systems, and devices. Although voice communication isn't going away, it's increasingly critical to build networks that also accommodate data and merge the two worlds in a transparent way.

Although the technology has existed for years and a large number of enterprises have already put it into play, many CIOs are now exploring ways to bolster capabilities to match today's digital workplace. The changing nature of worker behavior and the need for enhanced communications is resulting in the creation of a series of communication tools and devices that are helping the worker to perform their job efficiently on the go. These business endpoints include softphones, UC clients (integrating multiple communication applications such as messaging, presence, conferencing), and mobile soft clients. Headsets are the key element that will allow for continuous communication independent of the type of worker, location, or device being used. Today's workers have to be five times as responsive and agile as their predecessors were. In addition to telephones, they must use tools such as e-mails, calendars, IM, Web conferencing, and presence.

DEPLOYMENT OF SOFTPHONES

While most employees continue to use their desktop phones as their primary voice communication devices, businesses are increasingly deploying softphones as adjunct or secondary endpoints. The growth of softphones is driving the demand for high-quality headsets. Continued innovation in the communications endpoint market is likely to result in greater choice, flexibility, and cost savings for IT buyers and their end users.

Where organizations will see the greatest bang for their buck in UC is communications-enabled business processes (CEBP)-when communication capabilities are embedded in or integrated with enterprise business processes and vertical applications. During the course of everyone's workday, there are times when they need to communicate with or receive information from co-workers, suppliers, partners, customers, and others, and the business process essentially comes to a halt until they get a response. By embedding communications capabilities directly into the business applications or business process workflow, these business processes can move forward without delays, reducing or eliminating human latency and making business flow smoothly.

According to Frost and Sullivan, the Unified Communications market in India is expected to grow at 11.8% CAGR from 2010 to 2017. Driving this growth can be attributed to two factors: mobility and BYOD (Bring-your-own-device). Ongoing proliferation of 3G and broadband internet services in India is primarily driving the Unified Communications Market in India. Further, the rising adoption levels of enterprise mobility and the presence of abundant smart hand held devices in India also happen to push the market by a large extent. Owing to the presence of the public sector and as well as the SMB market space, the UC vendors in India are poised to reap substantial benefits in the ensuing years.

In India, UC solutions are being increasingly adopted by larger enterprises that have multiple offices spread in different geographies, and where collaboration between teams across locations is extremely critical for the business. Considering the investment costs, small and medium businesses have not really started contemplating on UC solutions. With the UCaaS market starting to take off, in the next few years, SMBs would get an opportunity to leverage these solutions within their limited budgets. Also, the managed UC market is set to gain momentum amongst the large enterprises who would want to offload the operational and management jobs of their UC infrastructure to a vendor and focus on the core business functions.

As more and more organizations incorporate UC, the benefits extend beyond individuals to the enterprise as a whole, and the RoI is even greater. Companies that transform their business or business processes, or truly change how work is completed, can find the highest return on investment.

Today's increasingly tech-savvy workforce expects to have the business tools to help them get their work done more efficiently. Businesses should recognize what a powerful impact that integrating a unified communication solution can have on a worker collaboration and productivity.

Here are just a few reasons why should you add unified communications to your business' communication arsenal:

• Enhance Worker Productivity: Think of how much time a client or customer can waste in trying to reach a specific employee. By embracing unified communications platforms, businesses can integrate a hosted pbx phone system with the business-grade features needed to streamline operations. Workers will enjoy the benefits of advanced call forwarding, which can be used to route your business calls to a mobile or home phone. This will ensure that stepping away from your desk doesn't mean missing an important message. Auto attendants are virtual receptionists the can greet customers and route calls to the right person â?? it's an affordable alternative to a full time administrative assistant.

• Give Employees Freedom: Unified messaging turns an email account into a centralized hub where incoming messages can stream in from multiple sources, so that employees can work successfully from any location. If a message is sent to a cell phone, for instance, a direct click-to-call link can be sent to an email address so that the user can easily communicate using IP telephony. Email can also act as a hub for voice mail and recorded phone calls. Additionally, contact lists can be stores for easy access to customer or client information when needed.

• Encourage Collaboration: Videoconference is playing an increasing role in day-to-day communications. In fact, many smartphones can now support video text features meaning that video will soon be a standard method of SMS interaction. A unified communications platform can facilitate video web and audio conferences and generate enhanced collaboration across your entire organization.

• Decrease Costs: oftentimes, a small business will have communication plans that are too big for its needs, this practice is wasteful and drives up monthly costs. By unifying its communications, a small business will be able to reduce excessive expenditures and stay within budget requirements. Without having to sacrifice any of the features necessary to stay in touch with important contacts. That means that extra resources can be allocated toward company culture initiatives and improving workplace environment

• Scale to Fit Business Needs: A small business could turn into a large enterprise almost overnight. When that happens, you will not want to have to overhaul your communications system. A unified communications platform will be able to grow with your business. The communication tools can be customized to fit exactly what your business needs it.

Unifying communications is the competitive advantage that every business needs to leverage. This ensures that customer service never falls secondary to worker productivity and vice versa. Choosing to adopt a unified communication platform gives your company the tools necessary to complete successfully against businesses of all sizes.

While desktop phones will remain the primary voice communications endpoint for many years to come, softphones and smartphones are gaining grounds in the workplace. Expensive, feature-rich hardware appliances will increasingly be limited to specific settings, such as an executive's desktop, or in environments where mobile devices and softphones simply do not work, such as production floors.