It would be an understatement to say that communication today has become a basic necessity for an individual. Many people today feel helpless or get anxious, even if they do not have Internet connectivity on the smart phones or personal computers. The need to stay always connected is being felt today more than ever.
Though this holds true even in the enterprise, the need to have seamless communication is more of a business imperative than a professional luxury. Businesses change fast, customers need quick response, and decisions need to be made in real-time.
In many cases, employees are spending so much time traveling and just trying to reach their office, that they are now 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 look at taking enterprise communication beyond the desk and make it available to its employees irrespective of their location or time zone. It is here, that unified communications (UC) is starting to find relevance.
The market drivers for an organization to look at unified communications today are many. Besides growing their business and innovating while reducing cost and improving productivity, organizations are also expected to go-to-market faster and engage customers quicker than before. Today when a product releases it take very little time for the market to understand it and another vendor to catch up with something equally competitive.
Besides the business drivers, even technology is changing the way people communicate. According to Zia, of the 650 to 700 million mobile devices users in India, 20% today use a smart phone. They are looking to exploit smart phone capabilities and organizations too are trying to provide enterprise applications to employees on their hand held devices. It is therefore essential that they have enterprise communication extended to and integrated with these devices.
Is it all really unified?
The whole idea of unified communications was to provide seamless integration between enterprise systems, applications and the various communication media, such that employees can seamlessly switch communication between say a desktop, a desk phone and a mobile device.
Unified communications solutions promised to provide a platform that would integrate, for instance the company’s Microsoft SharePoint portal with an instant messenger application. The same platform would further provide the employee’s current location through tools such as Presence.
Some even extended this to audio, video and web conferencing. And then it also included a single number phone access to the employee irrespective of whether they make or receive calls on their mobile phone or desk phone. However, despite all these various features available as a single platform, UC in India has not seen a strong take off from an end-to-end solutions perspective.
The reason for this is the fact that many organizations have already invested into building considerable amount of communications infrastructure. They are now investing in UC solutions on a need-per basis, looking at what integrates the best with their current infrastructure, while serving their business requirements in the best possible manner.
Quinlan believes that organizations usually start with some form of unified messaging, which is usually an extension of e-mail and then try to integrate it with Calendaring and SharePoint capabilities. According to him, a lot of organizations are currently at that stage where they are trying to integrate Instant Messaging (IM) and Presence with these platforms. At some point they will also try to implement desktop video conferencing with the same software client that gives them Presence and IM capabilities.
Also, the telephony solutions under a UC platform are typically IP-based and the current regulatory requirements restrict IP telephony overlap with PSTN lines. This is typically limiting all organizations using IP telephony to a corporate user group, thereby defeating the premise of seamless communication to a great extent.
“However, UC can become prevalent in India only after further deregulation. Today the VoIP network cannot break it out to PSTN networks. Due to this, a lot of capabilities that UC solutions offer, cannot be extended to consumers,” observes Gopinath.
He further observes that UC solutions are seeing relatively slower adoption because it takes some amount of effort to get across the ROI to the organizational management. Because UC impacts productivity and saves time and travel costs, the IT team can only tie it to intangible benefits, such as improved productivity and communication efficiency or lower communication costs.
Benefits are usually quantified in terms of say, if the organization spends a particular amount on communication and travel, that amount could increase by about eight times in the future. It could instead spend twice as much as its current spend, on investing in a UC solution and save on the costs that it could otherwise incur in future.
Gopinath too believes that while the rate of adoption is slow, there is some level of investment being made by organizations, in specific products that can address their immediate requirements.
Vendors today are providing a common platform that helps integrate these functionalities with each other to a great extent. However, customers are also choosing these platforms based on the level of integration that they provide with their current enterprise communication infrastructure investments.
UC adoption: Slow but steady
Though adoption of UC technologies is sporadic, the technology approach by itself is still finding a lot of takers. There are organizations who are looking to rationalize their spends on telephony, by deploying IP telephony within the enterprise and extending it to as many stakeholders to the business as possible. There are also those, who are also looking to deploy audio, video and web conferencing solutions across their enterprise and in some cases across a variety of end user devices.
Avaya for instance has an Indian MNC conglomerate which deployed its solution for over 75,000 of its employees globally. This particular company was seeing a considerable spend on communication for its offices spread across different locations, due to the absence of a common communication platform.
It rolled out VoIP services based on the vendor’s Aura architecture for all 75,000 of its employees. It also rolled out single number service, a common messaging and conferencing services based on the same platform. With the company using its internal WAN network for all official communication, it saw a saving of Rs 9 crore per month on communication costs, and increase in productivity and decrease in travel costs by 20%.
Research In Motion (RIM) offers something similar and has found good acceptance for its solution across verticals. The company has taken its enterprise e-mail platform offered on Blackberry phones and integrated UC functionalities such as IP telephony and extensions to IM and presence functionalities from UC applications such as Office Communications Server (OCS) from Microsoft and Sametime from IBM to offer a UC solution on the smart phone.
RIM through its Mobile Voice System (MVS) solution integrates the functionalities of the IP PBX solution deployed by the organization with the Blackberry devices used by its employees such that, the device becomes an extension of the user’s IP desk phone extension in office.
Lalvani explains that by integrating the Blackberry device with the IP-PBX infrastructure, an organization can eliminate the need to deploy IP-based desk phones and save on hardware costs, as the MVS provides a single number across the company network for every user along with all other IP-PBX functionalities offered by the desk phone.
Furthermore, the user when traveling to other parts of the country or overseas can call anyone within the corporate network using the IP telephony functionalities in an available Wi-Fi zone, thereby saving that significant fraction of roaming costs that he would have otherwise incurred. However the solution logically partitions the corporate telephony network from the PSTN or cellular network such that calls made outside the corporate user group (CUG) defined by the enterprise directory are made over the standard PSTN or cellular network.
The solution also integrates with tools like WebEx such that a WebEx audio, video and/or web conferencing session can be started on the phone over the 3G network. The solution is primarily aimed at enterprises with large mobile workforce, executives traveling overseas frequently, and presence across multiple locations.
According to Lalvani, customers deploying the solution have seen up to 60% savings on roaming costs by deploying MVS. The company has found acceptance for its solution across verticals including manufacturing and healthcare and BFSI.
For instance financial services company, Financial Technologies has adopted RIM’s solution, for its offices spread across multiple location and its traveling executives. The company has been able to achieve significant amount of savings on roaming costs with the deployment and improve employee availability to customers across multiple location with the single number functionality.
Cisco too, is finding its share of success for its UC solutions in the Indian market. For instance, Idea Cellular was looking at a solution that could help them improve employee productivity and business efficiency such that, they can better address the highly competitive telecom market. UC solutions can also aid companies in effective decision making, empowering organizations to consider inputs from various teams such as sales and marketing, product delivery, and billing services across different geographical locations.
The company deployed Cisco’s UC solution, which includes enterprise mobility, conferencing and desktop video solutions that are integrated with its other enterprise applications such as Microsoft Outlook and Office. Idea cellular has adopted the solution across 23 of its operating circles covering over 6000 employees. One year into the deployment, the company has already managed to reduce travel costs, and speed up its decision making process. The faster decision making according to Zia, has helped the company bid smarter for 3G connectivity and cover more circles.
Similarly, Mahindra & Mahindra has deployed the company’s TelePresence solution across its main office in Mumbai and engineering plants in Mumbai and Chakan and the R&D center in Chennai, to achieve greater level of collaboration between its R&D centers and engineering plants and its partners and suppliers for development of new products.
Says Zia,”Seamless collaboration between these teams is crucial for the success of the new products that the company launches. Manufacturing companies today are looking at these technologies not from a cost reduction perspective, but to improve their time to market. They want to avoid any mistakes that could occur during the time when the product passes from R&D to engineering and from there to production and then finally to customers.”
Quoting a Frost and Sullivan estimate Shetty of Avaya says, “The IP telephony market in India in the calendar year 2010-11 grew by 21%. Conferencing and collaboration market in India grew by 34%, while unified messaging grew by 28% and IM and presence grew by 17%. While the user base of IP telephony and conferencing and collaboration is large, it is comparatively smaller for unified messaging and IM and presence.”
Shetty believes that personal video conferencing is just getting popular across enterprises and it will be a big UC growth driver in the near future. However, personalized customer service is becoming increasingly important especially in the BFSI sector and therefore, it would look at UC solutions that can be used for personalized interactions with customers.
Taking the managed services route
While organizations may want to unify their enterprise communication infrastructure, communication and collaboration technologies do not form core part of their business. Enterprise IT teams spend a considerable amount on implementing core business applications, maintaining and upgrading the infrastructure whenever required. Deploying, managing and upgrading collaboration solutions add to costs and increases management complexities.
It makes good sense for the IT team use these technologies as a service which is delivered, deployed and managed by a service provider. The approach may eliminate complexities and management overheads, while the organization can consume UC solutions in a cost-effective, scalable manner and focus on their core business processes.
Quinlan of Tata Communications is of the view that people are adopting video conferencing as a service or a managed service as they do not have internal expertise and global reach to deploy video conferencing on their networks.
“We see IM and Presence, and low cost cloud-based e-mail being adopted by SMBs. IP telephony on the other hand has not picked up as much. It could be because organizations are looking to sweat out their existing infrastructure. Also, while regulatory requirements are an inhibitor, and this could change soon, it does create opportunities for managed service providers to implement IP telephony within the regulatory context and provide it to the users,” he says.
This is where Tata Communications is seeing a growth opportunity for its managed or hosted UC services. As organizations try to retire their older communication infrastructure or integrate new solutions with the existing investments, they can look at gradually migrating some of the communication tools to the cloud instead of trying to implement them on-premise.
Gopinath of Reliance Business Services has a similar point of view and says, “As existing legacy communication infrastructure reaches end of life, organizations can look at service providers to provide and manage the UC functionalities that they require, instead of picking and choosing solutions from different vendors and trying to integrate them.”
“A single service provider today can provide voice, mobile, unified communication and collaboration capabilities today. An enterprise might take solutions from different vendors and try to run them on their infrastructure, but who would they talk to in case there is an issue?” he quipped.
Service providers today offer a gamut of unified communications and collaboration tools as a service or a managed service and these include IP telephony, hosted messaging, audio and video conferencing, and hosted contact center solutions.
Reliance Business Services for instance, offers managed contact center services on a pay-as-you-go model based on the number of seats. According to Gopinath, this business for the company is growing at 15 to 20%.
He further informs that audio and video conferencing capabilities are among the popular ones to be chosen to be delivered as a service. Reliance Business Services offers, convergence between fixed and mobile telephony services such that calls between the service provider’s wireline and mobile phones within the CUG can be made free of cost. The company already has 150 of its customers using these services.
Tata Communications which also provides audio and web conferencing, hosted contact center and Network IVR (interactive voice response) and network ICR (Intelligent call routing) services is seeing good adoption rates especially for its audio and web conferencing, and hosted contact center services.
What lies ahead
While unified communications is finding acceptance within the enterprise segment, the focus in the coming years would be greatly on delivering the same enterprise communication on mobile devices. Most of smart phones or tablet devices today have features that can be easily leveraged for audio, video and web collaboration. With the growth in 3G adoption and the increase in corporate Wi-Fi networks, mobile devices would be a strong growth driver for UC in the days to come.
Sharing a similar opinion, Dr. R Venkasteswaran, Senior Vice President and CTO, Persistent Systems says, “A tablet, for instance, today offers the ability to chat through an instant messenger, access e-mail and even enterprise applications to a certain extent. It also has hardware capabilities to provide rich audio and video conferencing experience. Organizations will increasingly start to look at integrating these mobile devices into the UC infrastructure.“
However, he is quick to add that while the focus may be more on delivering UC solutions on mobile devices and lesser on desktops or laptops in the future, desktops and laptops will still be relevant from an enterprise communication perspective. He observes that with their current capabilities, mobile devices act as delivery medium which is used more for consumption than creation of information and therefore desktops or laptops will still find a spot in the enterprise communication infrastructure.
Furthermore, the focus may also shift from adopting solutions on-premise to having them delivered from the cloud. The success of specific UC applications such as video conferencing being delivered out of the cloud, is tied to how well the bandwidth and quality of service requirements are addressed.
“Voice services integrated with other UC applications such as instant messaging and collaboration applications, are being delivered via the cloud model for quite some time now. However, video conferencing is a bandwidth intensive application and while the technology is available, the economic aspect of these technologies inhibits widespread adoption today. But, it is only a matter of a year and half or more before this situation changes,” he says.