Unified Communications has evolved to support the proliferation of mobile devices and a multiplicity of delivery channels with hooks into the Cloud. By Prashant L Rao
Looking at the Indian UC market, according to Frost & Sullivan, it amounted to $465 mn in 2010 up from $411mn in 2009. The growth projection for 2010-17 is 11.8%. Within this market, the Conferencing & Collaboration segment grew robustly in 2010 by 33%. Some areas of interest are Unified Messaging and Unified Cloud Presence & Integrated Messaging. The enterprise IP telephony and contact center markets are growing slower than the actual applications. This segment was worth $181 mn and grew 3.6% in 2010.
He gave the example of IDEA Cellular that had gone in for this combination across the organization.
UC enables richer collaboration between employees and promotes efficiency in visibility through its integration with other applications. Some of the trends in this category revolve around mobility, video and virtualization. There’s also quite a bit of interest around social media.
Tablets & smartphones
One trend that many observers have spotlighted of late is that of Bring Your Own Device or BYOD where companies encourage employees to bring their own devices to work and use them to access corporate data and applications.
Cisco’s Zia said, “BYOD is taking root in India as well with pilots underway. In IT services companies, this is becoming an interesting talking point with customers. Companies are pushing secure clients onto tablets and offering access to information like project management tools, e-mail, IM etc.” The interest in UC is more from the mobility and BYOD perspective nowadays.
“As of now, BYOD is and will be the driving factor in spurring the adoption of Unified Communications. With enterprises adopting BYOD extensively, the need for CIOs to give users a top-notch ‘desktop experience’ will be a major factor in driving the UC market in India and globally as well,” commented Himanshu Goyal, Country Manager, Lotus, IBM Software Group India/ South Asia.
Social media integration
Social media is perhaps the hottest trend in the consumer Internet space. When it comes to business use, many organizations have successfully leveraged this trend to sell products or build up the hype around product launches and even for damage control. Like any other technology, UC hasn’t remained immune to the massive popularity of social networks. Companies are leveraging social media integration for fine tuning customer service.
“Some organizations are trying out social media integration in their contact centers. Social Media Manager lets you filter social media by keywords and transfer this information to the contact center. From social media to social business you can quantify the use of social media. Social media exposes the flaws in customer care,” commented Shetty of Avaya.
Persistent Systems deployed Cisco Quad for 7,000 employees to drive interactions between project teams spread across time zones by facilitating stronger interaction and collaboration.
Social media and UC can work together to transform the enterprise by leading to increased collaboration between influential consumers and companies in a wide range of areas including customer service feedback and suggestions for new product development. “UC has been about collaboration. Social media is about engagement. So it makes sense for the two to blend together. A new class of multi-mobile communications apps will emerge that facilitate greater collaboration and customer engagement,” said Ede of GN Netcom.
Newell of Polycom said, “Social business media is normal for Gen Y. Companies are recognizing this as an important means of how employees interact. We are working with social media providers to embed video in their network. We recently acquired ViVu whose technology enables you to go from a Web browser to a video chat. This has been incorporated by a number of customers already. Some of our customers are talking about using this technology for social media interaction.”
Cloud services around UC
No technology has managed to stay outside the Cloud’s sphere of influence. In the case of UC, it’s UC as-a-Service or the clumsy acronym UCaaS. Avaya’s bullish about how the Cloud plays in this space. “The Cloud services architecture is convenient and flexible and helps customers save money,” said Shetty. The vendor provides a service provider platform for managing SIP-based apps. Some of what’s available includes universal communication/collaboration using voice, video, data and messaging and on demand collaboration as well as customer service capabilities. This includes presence, location and multi-vendor integration. There’s even an application market where the enterprise workforce can go and download applications from. The vendor also has SaaS-style subscription-based on demand offerings including Web.alive. Then there are operational services to manage things for the customer using a Cloud-based platform wherein the customer outsources things to Avaya or a service provider.
Cisco offers Cloud based UC in two ways. One is through WebEx. The second is on the video side through its partnership with Tata Communications. This is Video-as-a-Service and it has proved to be quite a success for the vendor. The feeling is that, with the ongoing consolidation in the telecom space, the operators’ focus would shift from acquiring low-value subscribers to building Cloud offerings for enterprises.
Ede of GN Netcom commented, “UCaaS has significant growth potential. Increasing bandwidth availability and decreasing costs are driving renewed interest in hosted services.”
For Sify, UCaaS is part of its integrated bandwidth play. The service provider offers IP telephony, data, video, voice etc. all on a subscription model.
Diminishing role of voice
Time was when voice was the be all or end all in its avatar of IP telephony. That’s starting to change as companies adopt technologies such as presence/ IM and video alongside vanilla voice. Having said that, voice is still the leader of the pack. IBM’s Goyal sees IP voice as the gateway to the world of UC.
“The share of voice in UC is going down. IM is the new dial tone. You IM someone to check if they are there before you call them. UC is about whichever technology suits you at a particular point of time to get your work done,” said Polycom’s Newell.
Avaya’s take was that other apps were growing twice as fast as telephony. Conferencing & collaboration, Unified Messaging and Unified Presence were all popular. Mobility apps were setting the pace and Communication-enabled Business Processes (CEBP) that required a lot of customization were the way to go.
As per Cisco, Voice-based communications will remain a mainstay although video is, at some point in the next two years, going to be as big as voice. Today video is half the size of voice. The way it’s growing at 30-40%, in the next two years it will equal or exceed voice’s share in the UC pie. Voice is 50-55% of UC revenue-wise at this point.
Ede of GN Netcom felt that Video conferencing was going to be important. He also felt that IM was increasingly penetrating the enterprise market. Presence management is an important app. Apps around mobility are going to be popular. Enterprises in India are increasingly mobile enabling apps, especially for sales and service staff. Some people have rolled out CRM to the field force.
Sify’s take was that it was still predominantly about voice although the use of video was picking up.
Contact centers
The consensus was that there was still a substantial opportunity in terms of penetration of IP in the call center space which remains low. However, the growth of the contact center segment is no longer zipping ahead at a scorching pace the way it used to and that’s largely because of the diminishing fortunes of the Indian BPO sector.
Avaya’s Shetty made the point that existing centers were in the process of adopting newer channels. This was largely on account of the younger generation being more comfortable with IM or chat. User adoption is leading to contact centers changing and newer roll outs typically involve voice and multimedia. That may be 20-30% today but it will increase. There’s growing acceptance of Interactive Voice & Video Response (IVVR) systems.
Cisco’s Zia said, “The contact center industry is not a high level growth market in India. Once they were a high growth market at 25%. Today that’s dropped to 10-12%. The BPO industry isn’t doing as well as it used to. Domestic BPO was growing but, because of the telecom sector’s problems, that growth has also tapered off. This market’s growth is going to be stuck in single digits for the next few years till the Public Sector Banks start adopting it in a big way. Today they don’t have a full-fledged strategy around the use of contact centers. The hospitality and e-commerce sectors might add some growth to this industry.”
Ede of GN Netcom said, “There’s still huge potential for UC adoption in the call center space. In the next few years, half of the call centers will be using IP-based equipment. IP allows you to set up virtual contact centers in the Cloud. That transition has been kind of slow. 15% of call centers are currently using IP equipment.”
Polycom’s Newell said, “You still have a lot of consumers who only have a PSTN line so call centers are going to be required for a long time. As Gen Y grows up and they want to do more over chat, IM and video chat, you have to be attuned to that and be able to offer that as a fully rounded contact center. The traditional call centers are still alive and kicking but the smart ones are adding these other features to their portfolio of services.”
Ghosh of Sify felt that contact center companies were going in for lease-based offerings. A contact center is more about voice. When it comes to video, you need a Master Control Unit that can be leased out.
Other verticals
IP telephony end point pricing is coming down leading to its adoption in verticals such as healthcare (to improve productivity/mobility and automation), BFSI (for outreach leading to increased productivity and profitability; contact centers; virtual experts), hospitality (save costs, one cable into one room is used for delivering all services and to differentiate the user experience), government, education (some part of UC), online retail and manufacturing, said Avaya’s Shetty.
Cisco’s Zia commented that IT services companies were investing a lot on UC. Because of dollar appreciation, the capacity of these companies to invest has grown. Then there’s been growth in the use of UC by the financial services sector, especially of video. Manufacturing is picking up in comparison to what it used to be. However, the public sector has closed down in the last one year with no major decisions being taken.
GN Netcom’s Ede felt that penetration was highest in the financial industries especially in commercial banking and insurance. The Indian healthcare, manufacturing and energy/utilities sectors were all cited as adopters.
IBM saw banking, travel, tourism, education, retail and healthcare adopting UC solutions other than IT/ITES.
Polycom saw demand in terms of virtual classrooms in education and virtual hospitals in healthcare. BPOs are being driven to adopt UC because of their clients’ demands. The SMB segment is a massive growth area. “We have partnerships with Airtel, Tulip and RCOM. We are working with them to take it from an enterprise focus to SMBs so that we can expand the market,” said Newell.
Sify saw a market in retail and in finance (for internal IP telephony).
Clearly, UC is evolving to the point where it is no longer simply about voice. It’s already a voice-plus scenario and over time the role of voice will decline although it will always be an important component. Video is poised to grow in terms of uptake and other technologies that are likely to have a significant impact going forward include social media integration and Cloud-based offerings. In terms of adoption, this technology is finding use cases across industry verticals other than IT/ITES. In terms of pure technology, one possible development is the emergence of 3D video though that would be in the longer term. “In the longer term, beyond mobility, maybe someday it will get to virtual 3D holographic video,”concluded Polycom’s Newell.
prashant.rao@expressindia.com