The Unified Communications Value Proposition - What Does It Offer?

Unified Communications and collaboration solutions are gaining tremendous popularity within enterprises today. Whether it is buzz or actual implementation, enterprises today are aware of the need for a collaborative communication platform.

Communication technologies have come a long way as well. Conventional PBX-based technologies are now converging into IP. Vendors today are out to convince CIOs of the benefits of Unified Collaboration within the enterprise.

The Problem

One of the biggest challenges of Unified Communication conventionally revolved around its integration into enterprise systems. However, today, the strategy is different. Vendors claim that today, UC is capable of being integrated with most enterprise telephony networks. Talking about smaller enterprises, one of the biggest challenges that any SME faces in today’s harsh, competitive landscape is reducing costs and adding efficiency in daily operations.

“SMEs will have to get innovative in how they use technology. In most cases, benefits offered by voice and video conferencing solutions are clear. However, it is important to note that even though it is fairly obvious that Unified Communications will help SMEs tremendously, one solution will not fit all. A real estate agency will have a completely different set of issues and needs from a florist and a florist will have totally different needs from a lawyer firm,” says Dipesh Mohile, Sr Analyst, Tonse Telecom.

Apart from the early adopters, analysts believe that adoption by smaller enterprises will not really take off until the 2009-2011 period. Most SMEs first need to establish an online presence (become broadband enabled). Smaller enterprises, meanwhile, definitely see the value proposition of converged communication solutions. However, factors such as weak broadband penetration and employee education are making it difficult for smaller enterprises to adopt these solutions.

“The biggest challenge any SME faces in today’s competitive landscape is reducing costs and adding efficiency in daily operations. They need to strive to save every penny and add every minute in productivity,” explains Mohile.

According to Jasjeet Sawhney, chairman and CEO, Net4India, another commonly encountered pain point within some enterprises is the presence of legacy systems. These systems don’t really cause that many problems, but it’s the process of evaluation and compatibility tests, etc that delays the integration process.

Net4India has been offering converged voice services since they first made a presence in the country back in 2002.

The Web 2.0 Effect

Speaking about Web 2.0 type platforms, Mohile says, “Web 2.0 gives the user the ability to generate content instead of just consuming it, and this is a very valuable tool in an enterprise that can provide benefits by allowing sharing and accessing of information by all employees.”

“Social Networking tools coupled with Presence / Location and tied in with Custom Search will facilitate corporate communications of tomorrow. The Office Apps will be advanced enough to determine whether specific types of data may be presented or not depending on level of security available,” he adds.

UC as a Hosted Solution

There has been a growing trend across the globe on providing UC as a hosted solution. Although the concept has gained considerable momentum abroad, the situation across the sub-continent is more at an educational phase.

“From a customer’s perspective, there is a change in ideology. Earlier what was happening was that the customer would have a requirement for a PBX, to route calls in and out of office, and then he would spend time figuring out what brand to buy, how to integrate it into his environment. Therefore, the implementation would end up taking a large amount of time. Today, customers are more focused on the end service. They want a single pipe of communication, which they can buy from a solution provider. The trends are changing. You’re going to see more companies signing SLAs and QoS parameters, as opposed to shopping for a solution,” mentions Sawhney.

In bigger organisations that have multiple units engaging in different areas of business, tools like Wiki pages can be invaluable. Information about particular projects can be made available on these pages where all users have the ability to upload latest content.

The Future

Although most UC implementations today revolve around converging on the telephony network, and integration into office applications, or intranets, the future of UC lies in deeper integration. UC vendors are looking to integrate the communication framework into the business technology framework, so as to enable true workflow.

The 21st century has been an age of true mobility, and widespread human networks. Today, we exist in a truly global economy, where economic disruptions in one part of the globe can severely affect the other. Communication networks must be capable of scaling along with enterprises that constantly keep dealing with such dynamic conditions, and must more importantly play the role of an enabler.