Unified Communications: A New Hope

Unified Communications (UC) market, India shines amidst the depreciation of the local currency, political/regulatory instability, and dip in IT spending from across verticals. Due to the high initial cost attached with UC, it was never a cup of tea for SMBs. So far, only large enterprises, that converge voice, instant messaging, video, etc, on to one platform, were able to enjoy the benefits of UC.

But as we look at the evolution of enterprise computing infrastructure at this point in India, organizations can no longer afford to shy away from UC. It's interesting to note growing traction of concepts like BYOD are jump starting the UC market. For instance in FY13, as per vendors in the fray, BYOD acted as a catalyst for UC. Employees are spending their maximum time in traveling which reduces their efficiency in work.

So, to overcome this problem, companies are redirecting this time to working while traveling. Some are even given a choice to work from home or field locations to save on travel time and costs. All these factors are compelling organizations to take enterprise communication beyond their offices and make it available to its employees, irrespective of their location or time zone. Therefore, UC is starting to find relevance.

Besides growing their business and innovating to reduce cost and improve productivity, organizations are also facing competition to go-to-market faster and engage customers quicker than before. In this fast moving environment, there is very limited time not only for buyers to understand any new product, but also to catch up with another vendor regarding something equally competitive. A perceived benefit to the users of this unification is the ability to access services at any time, at any place and on any device.

Given this backdrop, UC helps to merge new architectures and communication tools together that helps businesses and individuals to manage all of their communications through a common platform.

GROWTH DRIVERS

In FY13, the UC market in India showed a significant 360 degree growth which involves not only customer acceptance but technology advancement, innovative portfolios, and a competitive landscape.

Mobile, social, and visual communications are re-shaping how people communicate and collaborate. "With organizations becoming increasingly fragmented, departments are more exible and employees more mobile," says Alok Anand, Marketing Head, India & Saarc, Polycom.
Some of the factors that will drive the growth of UC in coming years include:

 

• Access to Information: With majority of the official data being stored online, it has become important for companies to give access to stakeholders on this information. UC enables employees to work smarter and better, by making available key support information on laptops and smartphones. Similarly, during conference calls, unified communications packages play a role in enabling desktop-sharing, which lets the conference participants to jointly view and edit documents in real time.

• BYOD: Bring your own device (BYOD) means fewer mobile devices to carry and maintain. As BYOD takes firm root, the focus for organizations in 2013 would be managing, securing, and controlling personally owned mobile devices as well as their applications and information.

The biggest challenge is the gap between products and practices both for deployment and increasing end-user adoption that will continue to mature during the next several years. Vendors need to have clear justification and implementation programs to support their customers.

• The Volatile Economic Environment: This has also led to corporates cutting costs and that is exactly what UC solutions help them to do; it uses telecom and IT infrastructure to provide seamless, integrated voice mail, email, conference calling, and IM services, thereby giving employees the ability to reach colleagues wherever they may be, with the help of an appropriate communication tool.

• Green IT: With organizations becoming increasingly conscious about their carbon footprint, UC solutions are widely accepted as they help reduce travel which in turn helps the environment stay greener.

• Convergence: Corporates are moving towards consolidating their communication platforms to reduce costs and increase efficiency. The need for convergence has created a paradigm shift that focuses on an unified domain instead of silo-based architecture. "The transformation of traditional PBX networks into IP based systems, reiterates this development," says Bala Mahadevan, CEO-India, Orange Business Services.

• Cloud-based Solutions: As companies look to shift IT costs to a predictable operational expense, and not to a periodic and big capital investment, cloud services, hosted solutions, and managed services are taking fast flight. Cloud has captured the imagination of businesses of all sizes. Most of the small and mid-size businesses (SMB) use cloud services today. Web hosting and email top the list, but in 2013 one can expect collaboration and IP telephony to migrate to the cloud.

• Social Customer Service Emerges: Companies are looking to successfully integrated social media into their traditional sales, service, and support channels that can open up the conversation in new and exciting ways.

• Virtualization: Most organizations have virtualized many applications and servers in their data centers, but they have been slow to virtualize UC applications. But with mature solutions, companies can virtualize communications and collaboration applications.

WHAT IS RESTRAINING GROWTH OF UC:

Gartner highlighted some key factors restraining the growth of UC such as:

• The biggest challenge is the gap between products and practices both for deployment and increasing end-user adoption that will continue to mature during the next several years. Vendor need to have clear justification and implementation programs to support their customers.

• Second major challenge, which is immaturity, unpreparedness or lack of geographic coverage, of necessary understanding, skills, and services in the vendors channels. For some vendors, the concern was mostly about the regional availability of the channels and support for UC. That would not be a specific vendor concern for companies operating only in well-supported regions. But for most multi-national companies, consistent skills and support coverage will be an issue.

If one looks at UC adoption dynamics there are some early movers in this space. "BFSI segment is one early adopter. However, one can also see lot of interest in verticals beyond ITeS. Although, private sectors adoption rate is high there is an increased usage of UC solutions in the public sector, education, hospitality, judiciary, healthcare, manufacturing, and the pharmaceutical industry," says Bobby Joseph,Country Director India and Middle East, Plantronics.

COLLABORATION MARKET

Globally, the UC market is divided between on-premise, hybrid, etc, whereas Indian market vendors are split under audio visual, voice solutions, and collaboration platform. FY13 has seen businesses demand more effective access to scalable, sophisticated, real-time collaboration tools. A lot of organizations, both large and small now understand the power of collaboration which stands to offer a host of benefits. They realize that it can streamline their business processes and boost productivity, reliability, and competitiveness.

"The way companies communicate and collaborate is evolving rapidly driven by four significant shifts brought about by BYOD, mobility, cloud-based services, and social media. The need for an integrated approach to telephony, video, networking, and security has been pivotal as businesses opt for manageable, out-of-the-box packages that will help them manage costs and increase efficiencies," says Arun Shetty, Head, Unified Communications, Avaya India.

Earlier UC was adopted by enterprises but now one can see it has also become crucial for SMBs. Mobile enterprise has enabled employees, customers, partners, and suppliers to communicate and collaborate better. Video has been added as a new dimension to mobile enterprise as personalized customer service is becoming increasingly important especially in the BFSI sector. Effective integration of video solutions has helped deliver more effective collaboration.

To capture this high growth market, various vendors adopted different strategies.

VENDORS STRATEGIES

Though the UC market have various issues related to investments, user demand for advanced functionality, etc, still vendors bring various solutions to overcome these hiccups. In order to grab a better picture of the fiscal that breezed past, let's put the top player under the scanner.

CISCO

The company continued to be the market leader with offerings like IP communications, messaging, conferencing and collaboration, and contact center applications in addition to networking solutions. "Cisco collaboration portfolio includes a comprehensive unified communications (UC) suite, which covers voice, video, instant messaging (IM)/presence, and other UC applications"says Minhaj Zia, Director, Collaboration Sales, Cisco India & Saarc.

In 2012, the company launched Cisco Jabber-a solution that unifies IM, Presence, video, voice, voice messaging, desktop sharing, and conferencing capabilities securely into one client. This can operate on desktops or other mobility devices such as smartphones or tablets. The company also launched a virtualized web conferencing server that can unify audio, video, and web conferencing in a single solution.

Cisco's focus lies in making video solutions truly pervasive by imbibing mobility, hardware, and software solutions along with cloud-based solutions that will enable the reach of video to everyone.

MICROSOFT

After launching Microsoft Lync 2010, company has come up with Lync 2013 which offers several significant improvements over its Lync 2010 predecessor. The new Lync includes broader mobile client capabilities, improvements to its telephony and video functionality, and partial Skype integration.

The Lync Web App allows PC and Mac users to join a Lync Meeting from within a HTML5-based browser, and delivers a full Lync meeting experience, including multiparty HD video, voice over IP, instant messaging, desktop, application, and PowerPoint sharing.

AVAYA

This year Avaya has announced new and enhanced video collaboration solutions to support the mobile enterprise. The family of Avaya video collaboration solutions delivers the most comprehensive, easy to use video functions from the broadest range of mobile consumer devices, desktop, and room-based systems.

The video collaboration solutions include hardware and software-based infrastructure, applications, and client endpoints.

With Avaya IP Office 8.1, Avaya has delivered enhanced mobility, centralized management, increased security options and Avaya first services and support offer customized for SMEs. These features help SMEs thrive in rapidly changing workforce environment, increasingly characterized by a BYOD and advanced mobility.

IP Office 8.1 also scales significantly higher to provide mid-market organizations and the partners that serve theme with a rich array of collaboration capabilities in a simple, easy-to-use solution.

POLYCOM

In FY13 Polycom introduced various new solutions in UC space. The company introduced Polycom RealPresence CloudAXIS Suite that brings contacts from even Facebook, Skype, gtalk, Yahoo! Messenger, etc, into a global directory of participants that you can drag and drop into a Polycom video collaboration session for a secure, enterprise-grade collaboration experience. Besides Polycom RealPresence Mobile allows employees to connect and collaborate face-to-face while on the move.

OUTLOOK: WHAT LIES AHEAD

While UC is finding acceptance beyond the enterprise segment, the focus in the future would be greatly on delivering the same enterprise communication on mobile devices. With the growing adoption of 3G mobile network and strong wireless corporate communication, smartphones and tablets would be strong growth drivers for UC in the days to come.