With increasing pressure to increase bottomlines and revenues, organizations are slowly waking up to unified communication to trim travel cost, improve collaboration and step up productivity
Pupul Dutta
KPIT Cummins, a product engineering and IT consulting company, wanted to provide its employees, customers and partners a unified collaboration platform which would bring down costs and enhance communication. As most of its business deals were off-shore, employees were incessantly using office phones for overseas calls. With frequent travel, the situation was further worsened, putting pressure on the company’s bottomline. Relying mainly on email communication did not help, as it resulted in a huge gap between planning and execution.
In this backdrop, the company decided to deploy Microsoft’s UC suite, Office Communications Server 2007 R2, and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 to integrate with the existing Microsoft Outlook platform. The solution gave its users, a single interface that brought together telephony, instant messaging, conferencing, and presence capabilities on their computers. Communication costs were lowered by about 25%, and communication and collaboration were improved at the same time.
While UC globally is seeing a huge uptake, about 15-20% growth year-on-year, India is yet to warm up to this technology. Research firm Frost & Sullivan notes that the size of the UC market in the Asia Pacific region is expected to rise to $6.5 billion by 2015 from $4.3 billion in 2010. The report further says that Indian enterprises are estimated to have spent over $1.5 billion in hardware and software solutions related to UC over the past four years. However, the market for UC in India grew only by 7.5% over previous year.
“Higher growth in the market is expected in the coming years as more enterprises experience the requirement of collaboration solutions and move toward adopting higher priced and better quality solutions,” the F&S report notes.
Integration of various collaboration technologies such as video, Instant Messaging (IM), presence in web conferencing, email and contact center solutions, will not only provide complete end-to-end collaboration but also prove to be a money spinner for companies in the coming years. Companies today are fast moving toward a richer experience – a mixture of audio, video and content. This in turn is expected to drive the UC market further.
Moreover, with the masses being gung ho about touchscreen devices, the need for collaboration on the go has only gone up. While on-premise UC solutions are preferred by large enterprises which have high collaboration and security requirements, cloud-based UC is also expected to give a fillip to the demand in the future.
Current trends
The UC market is being driven by a number of trends like a growing mobile workforce, bring-your-own-device (BYOD), increasing internet penetration and the use of video. In the current business environment, with a growing mobile workforce, UC ensures that the communication costs are kept in check even as user satisfaction grows and long-term support costs are brought down.
Minhaj Zia, Managing Director, Polycom, explains, “Most enterprises today want to enable video as part of their communication tools. Also, the total experience of audio and video as well as feature-rich content on mobile, is driving the UC market. The content should be available on mobile devices and not just restricted to desktops.”
The ongoing proliferation of 3G and broadband internet services are also driving the UC market in the country. According to research firm IDC, video conferencing too is becoming a larger part of vendors’ overall UC offerings as organizations continue to push for video as part of their UC initiatives.
“With the improvement in communication infrastructure, increased pressure of controlling cost and increased awareness on industry trends such as social collaboration, virtualization, cloud communication and mobility, the UC market in India is witnessing rapid growth,” notes Bobby Joseph, Country Director, India and Middle East, Plantronics.
Another popular trend is the growing use of WebRTC, an open, free project that aims to embed web browsers with real-time communication capabilities through the use of simple JavaScript APIs (application programming interfaces). The project is supported by Google, Mozilla and Opera.
“We believe that a true collaboration tool needs to be accessible to the widest possible community of users, which is why we see open standards such as WebRTC as the next step for our evolution in collaboration applications. We are certain about the huge potential that these technologies hold for enriching the ecosystem and experience of collaboration tools. Sitting in the background, working with applications, WebRTC will increasingly allow browsers to become multimedia communication hubs. For individual employees, this means access to video and voice calling, as well as instant messaging — all embedded within the browser they keep open all day long on their desktop,” says Anthony Bartolo, Senior Vice-President, Unified Communications and Collaboration, Tata Communications.
Mobility and UC
Mobility has been the absolute key factor in driving unified communications’ growth.
With the Gen Y becoming a huge part of today’s workforce, mobility is going to be on a constant rise in the coming years. This in turn indicates a rise in the BYOD adoption amongst the employees. A report from IDC predicts that by 2015, the world’s mobile worker population will reach 1.3 billion, representing 37.2% of the total workforce. According to Springboard Research, India’s mobile workforce is slated to grow from 134 million in 2011 to 205 million by 2015 and about two-thirds of it would be using smartphones.
Organizations are also utilizing unified communications solutions to reduce operational costs while simultaneously lowering response times and enhancing employee output.
“Telephony and contact center markets are reaching maturity and would see low growth rates, whereas e-mail, IM/presence, and mobility are gaining high traction and hence have good growth prospects in near future. The key application to look forward to in coming years would be conferencing and collaboration, for which, very high growth rates are anticipated,” says Zubair Alam, General Manager, Sales and Marketing, NEC India.
However, the flexible BYOD trend comes with its own set of challenges in terms of managing mobile UC sessions. “IT managers need to put products and policies in place so they can track, secure and monitor these interactions. The key to a successful mobile UC deployment is finding a solution that is BYOD ready, a solution that maximizes the benefits of BYOD while eliminating the challenges,” quips Ashish Gupta, Director- Carrier Sales, Blackberry India.
Moreover, though the market is full of solutions offering collaboration tools for enterprises adopting BYOD, India is yet to see a very high uptake. According to Frost & Sullivan, while this trend is seen to be picking up in other countries, the Indian customer is still wary of UC on the go, due to lack of uniform high broadband availability that affects quality and impacts the user experience while trying to connect.
On the other hand, there are some enterprises which are open to allowing personal devices into the enterprise network. Various reimbursement methods are also being seen across industries. Some of the common practices include organizations providing their own mobile device or allowing a personal device only above a certain organizational level.
On-the-go collaboration
When we talk about UC, on-the-fly collaboration tools are indispensable. E-mail, IM, audio and web conferencing are the most popular solutions for on-the-go collaboration.
Some of the popular on-the-go collaboration features/applications are Microsoft Sharepoint, Cisco Webex meetings and Blackberry enterprise instant messaging. While Microsoft’s Sharepoint ensures that users have the latest information with real-time updates — as colleagues edit important documents, such as proposals and contracts, or update the status of a project; Cisco’s webex allows users to easily attend, schedule and start a webex meeting from their Blackberry 10 smartphones.
Blackberry enterprise instant messaging, on the other hand, extends desktop enterprise instant messaging solutions like Microsoft Lync and IBM Sametime to “on-the-go” executives. This helps optimize communication and collaboration with real-time, secure one-to-one and multi-party instant messaging including the ability to seamlessly escalate a text chat into a voice call.
However, applications such as video conferencing which require high bandwidth, are not preferred since the voice and picture can become distorted or grainy when the user hits pockets with low bandwidth availability.
Conferencing in the cloud
In recent times, what server is to data center, cloud is to videoconferencing. Some of the startups in the IT sector have actually reaped success because of their pioneering efforts in cloud videoconferencing, while traditional videoconferencing stalwarts are re-imagining their product-based portfolios. The cloud and all that it bequeaths has turned the traditional videoconferencing network infrastructure into something that till now was unimaginable, inspiring a debate over the future of hardware infrastructure.
Cloud based conferencing is extremely popular across all modes in India – audio, video and web conferencing. The small and medium business (SMB) segment in particular are high adopters of cloud conferencing services due to lower capital investment requirements, unavailability of in-house IT departments, attractive price models and bundled offerings from service providers. “Cloud based conferencing services are anticipated to witness a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27.3% over the next 7 years,” notes the Information & Communication Technologies Practice of Frost & Sullivan.
However, big firms do not find cloud-based conferencing as attractive as their SMB counterparts.
Sanjay Chowdhry, Head – IT at General Cable explains why he doesn’t find cloud based conferencing solution exciting enough. For him it not only means a higher cost but also a security concern. “We have our own conferencing system. Recurring cost is much larger (in cloud) than one time capital cost. The company will never have their own asset till they use a cloud based system.
A company can have as many audio and video conferencing with no limit to hours and yet pay nothing since it is totally IP based and free of cost,” he says.
Issue of security
Security is one of the issues which has remained constant in a connected world. It is important for organizations to secure their assets and have a policy that secures their infrastructure. UC presents unique security challenges because it brings together disparate technologies. A UC business phone system combines VoIP, video, chat, email and presence together into one unified messaging system. As the technology has become more complex and more accessible from the public internet, the security threat has increased.
“In many ways, it is easier than ever to attack business communications. Companies must be diligent to protect their communications as they are vital to business operations,” says Sreedhar Venkatraman, Director – Sales Engineering, India & SAARC, Avaya.
Reiterating the same thought, Chowdhry ofGeneral Cable says, “Security is definitely an issue if a company is going to adopt UC on mobile devices. However, vendors are providing mobile devices control to the administrator sitting at the office.”
Consumerization of IT does bring in an element of security concern. Bring your own device introduces a wide array of unauthorized, unsecured devices into the workplace. Social media, video, IM, smartphones and tablets have erased the line between business and personal communication tools. “According to the Yankee Group, the tablet market will reach $45 billion and the smartphone application revenue will triple to $26.5 billion by 2014. Enabling BYOD empowers employees and maximizes their productivity,” Venkatraman says adding that this however also increases the threat to security.
The sectors most affected by this threat are BFSI, IT and government, which deal with highly sensitive information. As a result of this, these verticals tend to adopt on-premise solutions or hybrid cloud solutions. For example, web conferencing that enables files to be shared would be on-premise, but audio conferencing will be done on the cloud.
Vendors are addressing security concerns by enabling the enterprise to select the model of cloud deployment which they would be most comfortable with. For example, If an enterprise wished to deploy on-premise equipment, the provision of managing the service is given without allowing vendors access to sensitive data. Adds Chowdhry, “Presently, vendors are providing two portions on the mobile devices, one for official and other one for personal. The user has been given the rights to delete personal data but not official data. Other built in security features are also being provided by the vendors.”
Challenges
Since no technology implementation is bereft of any challenges, so is the case with unified communications. For a CIO, the biggest challenge is the budget required. Other challenges include policy creation and wider adoption by users.
In addition, the issue of interoperability between multi-vendor UC platforms continues to be an inhibitor. “It’s a huge challenge to choose the best-fit solution. Lack of knowledge about the best UC solutions and vendors is a big hindrance. Bandwidth issues too are causing blocks in the path of UC adoption,” notes Edgar Dias, Regional Director, India, Brocade.
Ascertaining concrete return on investment (RoI) for UC solutions is another pain area for CIOs. While most of the highly touted benefits include increase in employee productivity, improvement in speed of decision making processes, increase in employee satisfaction and being environment friendly, these need to be quantified in terms of monetary gains. Concrete benefits such as reduction in travel costs may not be enough to argue a case for UC to the top management. However, initiatives such as RoI calculators are being taken by service providers to help CIOs make better informed decisions when it comes to investing in UC.
Next, security remains a bone of contention for CIOs. Explains Ramkumar Pichai, General Manager, Microsoft Office Division, “Security is a major concern with hosted solutions and this pushes enterprises to adopt on-premise models, which tend to be more expensive. Hence, it comes back to making sure the RoI is worth the investment.”
Moreover, complicated licensing and payment models and dealing with multiple service providers creates resistance in enterprises for adopting UC collaboration solutions. Lack of awareness and perception about the benefits of collaboration versus the investment needed in licenses, technical teams and infrastructure, adds to this resistance. This is especially true for the SMB segment.
Competition provided by the free models of conferencing, e-mail and IM is high, especially in non-tech savvy verticals in the SMB segment.
Nevertheless, the demand for unified communication continues to grow. Also, people are moving up the social intercultural platform. Vendors are trying to reduce office delays, companies are moving to more and more cloud based unified communications and organizations are adopting more and more feature-rich UC solutions. Another trend that both vendors and CIOs feel will evolve is the integration of CRM with social computing platform, giving companies instant connection to their customers.
On the positive side, the cost of communication would go down and the quality would go up. BYOD is also expected to pick up as the number of 3G and 4G users increases across the country, thus bringing down overall communication costs for enterprises while improving collaboration.
Lastly, CIOs are also expecting an evolution of technologies that can be worn, something like Google Glass, which can be worn like spectacles and displays information in a smartphone-like hands-free format, and that can communicate with the internet via voice commands.
