Unified Communication: Can We Just Talk?

People need to talk. For a while, despite good intentions, technology had
actually become a barrier to fulfilling this basic need of people. The modern
human found himself torn between the love for a cellphone, the need for a
laptop, and the call of a persistently ringing plain old telephone system
(POTS). In the end, whatever conversation followed was in between the persistent
calls from another instrument. Much time was wasted trying to get connected,
rather than in communicating.

To add to the complexity, there came IP communications and even multimedia
communication solutions. The focus in today's communications field, therefore,
is to free the user from some of the complexities of managing the tools of
communications and to just let them talk and communicate.

Enter Unified Communications

Unified communications (UC) offers the ability to improve how the
individuals, groups and companies interact and perform tasks. It attempts to do
this by allowing multiple communication channels to be coordinated.

On a networking level, in some simple implementations, this may be achieved
by consolidating separate servers, but, more frequently, UC adds value to
existing communications servers by running the UC application over the IP
infrastructure. UC's key components are: an IP PBX, VoIP, presence, e-mail,
audio and Web conferencing, voice mail, unified messaging and instant messaging
(IM).

Vinod Sindigi, assistant manager, Marketing, ABS India says, “UC packages
and solutions are extension of PBX solutions. With the UC, the capabilities of
PBX are enhanced.”

Rajesh Shetty, regional manager, ITS, Cisco, India and SAARC, says, “UC is
a combination of many technologies, IP PBX is one. But over and above, it is
about how various people can access various types of communications from one
device.”

All the components of UC have been around for a while now, but as KVSSS
Gunneswara Rao, director, VoIP, D-Link India puts it, “The unified
communications fabric gets the results for the companies with end-to-end IP
Telephony, messaging, networking, contact center, customer management, and much
more.”

At the very basic, unified communications can mean integrating voicemail on
an e-mail server. Bill Korbe, director, Product Management (VoIP), Ensim,
elaborates, “Unified communications provides integrated messages in a single
in-box (voice, fax, email, images and video). But most of the time it is used in
the context of integrating voicemail and e-mail.”

Its real value to the company is that every user can access all the
communication meant for him, irrespective of the access technology or the
medium.

Names Don't Matter

It was multimedia communications some time ago, now it is called unified
communications, and other terminologies are already doing the rounds, such as
intelligent communications. However, with all these evolutions, the
communications setup has evolved.

According to Dhananjay Ganjoo, director, Sales and Channel, Nortel India,
“To begin with, we had reactive networks, then we had proactive networks, with
UC the network can become anticipatory.”

Dinesh Sehgal, head, Convergence Business Unit, Avaya Global Connect says,
“UC can be seen from the network side where we integrate some technologies or
applications, but this may or may not have an implication on the business
processes per se. The important question today is, how to create applications
for an intelligent infrastructure, which means applications like ERP, CRM, to be
integrated on voice communications or vice versa.” When the communications
system understands and caters to these needs, we can say it is an intelligent,
rather than just a unified communications system.

Many others talk about UC as an application that enables activities such as
collaboration, voice and video/Web conferencing and rich messaging, which would
include sharing of screens (all members of a conference being able to see a
slide that the presenter wants) and websites with each other.

Who Likes It

All kinds of organizations can benefit from it.
Sehgal goes on to include managing insurance agents and medical
representatives in the list.

The others in the industry are still going for the low-hanging fruits, as
Ganjoo puts it, “The early adopters were the IT workers, they were the low
hanging fruit, they saw the immediate benefit of combining VoIP, video and
collaboration under one tool and one screen rather than over diverse
applications that people had been using so far.”

	"The unified communications fabric gets the results for the companies" -KVSSS Gunneswara Rao, director, VoIP, D-Link
	"The impact UC will have on the business will depend on the ability to correlate use to productivity gains." -Yugal Sharma, country manager, India & SAARC, Polycom

The Recipe

The most important ingredient of a UC solution is 'need'. Therefore,
even before the organization goes for the new technology, it needs to assess all
its employees, mobile workers, desk bound, or working from home-do they really
need to unify all or some of their communications over and above the existing
communications set up? Sindigi exclaims, “UC will evolve as a business
enhancer tool only when there is a real requirement.” Without that, clearly,
no employee will make the effort for learning the new application.

For this, Rao says, the organization must “perform an electronic network
assessment that includes utilization and network statistics, check network
performance specifications, estimate the bandwidth requirements, have a strong
knowledge of both data and voice networks and appropriate IT support and choose
a scalable network infrastructure that will grow with your business.”

On the networking side, Korbe says, “The voicemail solution simply needs to
be able to forward your VMs to your e-mail system as e-mail audio
attachments.” This can be done by upgrading the VM solution or by obtaining a
new communication system that includes the VM that supports UC. That is where
the IP PBX comes in.

The IP PBX is not an absolute must for UC, but, as Shetty says, “An IP PBX
removes the complexity of the proprietary TDM hardware, and makes a PBX open
standard-based and working on open technology.” Besides the IP PBX, UC has
other components and communications media too, and it is only their combined
result that can be called UC. It is important to note that IP PBX per se won't
have unified communication build into it, there will be need for a separate
software to unify all the various communications channels and technologies.

For an implementation like this, an organization will need, besides an IP
infrastructure, an e-mail system, like Microsoft exchange.
It will also need a voicemail solution on the IP PBX. And, the voicemails
will have to be stored in the message store, along with the e-mails, as well as
the faxes. With that in place, e-mails can come to the PC in a normal way, the
UC software will make that voicemail also available on the PC in the same e-mail
client. Similarly, fax will be converted into a scan and sent in an e-mail. To
access these from a phone, the voicemail system will ensure that the e-mails are
read out to the user.

According to Yugal Sharma, country manager, India & SAARC, Polycom, there
needs to be a network that can carry the payloads that UC creates. While WiMAX
and UMTS would seem mandatory for UC, given India's archaic regulatory norms,
which disallow convergence of IP and PSTN communication, all that one needs is a
broadband connection.

Solutions like MCS 5100 from Nortel and Siemens OpenScape bring all the
functionalities and applications of the solution under a single solution, which
enables users to collaborate with applications like voice, video, and screen
sharing. And they can still access resources like e-mail and voicemail from a
non-UC specified equipment like POTS.

UC being a solution encompassing many solutions, vendors are collaborating
with each other to ensure interoperability. In an ideal world, based on
completely open standards (like SIP), this should not be an issue. Still,
vendors like Microsoft and Nortel are collaborating to ensure Microsoft's LCS
and Nortel's MCS interoperate Avaya and Nokia are also collaborating to bring
out handhelds.

The Costs

Hyped as UC is, Korbe says, at least in the US, “It often comes bundled
with newer technology solutions like IP-Centrex, IP-PBX.” So the cost or the
effort of deploying it could be a part of the effort that goes into deploying
the IP infrastructure in an organization.

While most vendors calculate the costs after receiving the requirements of
the customer, in India, Nortel has ventured ahead of the market with three
packages, which can give a 100 user deployment for anything between $30,000 to
about $60,000. While that may sound steep for 100 users, it offers all
additional ports at $65 a piece, irrespective of the complexity and the richness
of the features that were chosen for the first 100 users.

Also, currently, only the big organizations are going for it in India, and
over a base of 2000+ employees, the upfront cost of a UC solution may not be too
steep. Smaller organizations may have to wait for service providers to introduce
these services over IP Centrex solutions.

While an organization may feel confident that its IP infrastructure is in
place, it may still have to upgrade it to allow UC its full utilization. Rao
points out, “As data is not as time sensitive as voice or video, earlier
network architectures, and the network infrastructure developers did not focus
on QoS, reliability, always on and access, and 'right feed and speed'.” Of
course, solutions exist for this issue, but for organizations with older IP
infrastructure, this is also an additional cost.

Financial justifications for UC still come in soft RoIs like productivity,
but the market for it is still growing. Ganjoo estimates that the market for UC
could be around  $140 mn by the end
of this year.

Impediments

UC, if it is viewed as more than an integration of voicemail and e-mail, can
only move as fast as the adoption of IP in India. So the biggest hurdle in its
path is adoption of the parent technology. Then there are regulatory issues, and
almost all vendors agree that the full benefits of UC (or any other IP
technology) can only be had if convergence of PSTN is allowed with data
networks.

Regulatory hurdles also take a toll. Today, Avaya's EC 500 can potentially
trace a contact and reach him on a device of choice, wherever he is in the
world. However, the costs of doing that are immense, as the companies cannot
utilize their legitimately acquired resources. So, while a Cisco manager may be
contacted by customers in the US over a call manager on his PC, his customers in
India are forced to call him over a PSTN link. Expensive as the IP and UC
technologies are to roll out, the cost of long distance PSTN only adds to its
cost. The consensus in the industry therefore is that full convergence will
promote all IP technologies, and UC will also benefit from it.

Alok Singh

aloksi@cybermedia.co.in