Unified communications
May 2008, The Indian PC Magazine

Its been long since technology corridors have been abuzz with the promise of Unified Communications. However, consumers are still clueless about its practical impact. The Indian PC Magazine finds out how UC is about to revolutionize your communication experience in next five years.

MULTIPLE MOBILE Connections, too many email ids, office landlines, different web conference vendors and logins, Google talks and official internal messengers!! Woof! If connectivity enhanced productivity in the last decade, it is certain to land us into a mess in the coming one. When Alcatel-Lucent recently surveyed about 2,000 users about work communication, the findings revealed that 72% of those surveyed struggled to find the contact details of people when in cases of emergency. While 56% of these users preferred to have a single number for incoming messages and calls, 38% were using at least five communication tools Emails, mobiles, fixed lines, voicemails, IMs- You name them! And 20% said they received more than 100 emails every day! Communication overload has become a reality in every sense of the term. So in this mind-boggling communications ecosphere, how does one simplify life? Well, for many, unified communication is the answer!

UC: The User Perspective

Unified Communications perhaps has as many varied definitions as the solutions. At the risk of oversimplification, Unified Communications is IP telephony, voice mail, messaging, video conferencing et all bundled together. Organization world over are turning towards UC for reducing communication and operational costs and increased employee productivity. Just to give an example, through implementing UC solutions in voice and web conferencing in its own organization, BT has managed to reduce travel costs by more than £135 million. Through conferencing services alone, it has eliminated nearly 860,000 face-to face meetings.

Closer home, Marico discovered a brave new world of integrated communications. The company, which has started using one of Microsoft's UC products, sees the offering as a great enabler for its retail workforce on the move. Says Girish Rao, Head of IT Solutions at Marico, about the benefits of UC, "Employees can see the availability of their colleagues and how best to contact them whether by using phone, email message, instant messaging, or video conferencing." Marico has managed to reduce significant travel costs for its engineers and IT professionals. In the words of Vinod Kamath, Chief of Finance and IT, "The competitive advantage that it (Unified Communications) provides comes in the form of messaging tools that enable communication across multiple ven¬dors/ partners/ offices and locations."

With rapidly growing networks and geographical presence, companies are looking for solutions that can enable better communication and collaboration among their stakeholders and simultaneously reduce the time and cost on traveling of their employees for reviews and meetings.

IT Infrastructure and Unified Communications:

India, with its robust telecom infrastructure, favorable policies and regulatory framework and high bandwidth connectivity is a ripe ground for UC adoption in enterprises. UC can have a lot of relevance in telemarketing setups where it can help create a single user environment. This would ensure that all calls made to a call centre are attended by the right person at the right time. UC can add significant value to an organization's customer facing processes and enhance customer service and collections.

From an IT infrastructure perspective, unified communications can integrate voice and email communications; which have hitherto been provided to organizations by different vendors requiring a different set of hardware specifications.

Having a PC based unified communications suite helps you see if the person who you are trying to reach out to is available or not. This application, known as "Presence" is a remarkable feature of UC applications and can easily be embedded in line of business applications. Through the UC infrastructure, teams can work in real time and capitalize on business opportunities. Calling or initiating a web conference with someone is just a matter of clicking on someone's name! This is all the more relevant in our times when the computers have become the primary mode of workplace communications, overtaking telephony.

The UC revolution begins, now!

• The Virtual Workplace will become normative! Gone would be the era of centralization. Desktops and desk phones would disappear from the scene only to be replaced by mobile devices like laptops that take on additional office capabilities



• As a new generation enters the workforce, email will lose a great deal in terms of usage and significance and will be replaced by IM, with the latter becoming the preferred mode of business interaction



• Beyond Phone Calls to Collaborative Business Processes. Companies will go beyond the initial capabilities of IM to deep integration with busi¬ness processes and line-of-business applications, where they can realize the greatest benefit



• Interoperability and Open Standards will tear down proprietary walls across business and public domains. Corporate demand for interoperability and maturing of industry standards will force UC providers to embrace interoperability



• New meeting models which are more and more instantaneous will emerge. Online corporate meeting experiences will be transformed by a rich virtual world

The road ahead

UC will go a long way in simplifying the productivity challenges that multiple channels of communication present to individuals as well as organizations. But would be the challenges in implementing UC suites in organizations? Ranjan makes a very interesting point. "UC is a new area of communication, so the challenge would be to drive usage. Also, UC guys have expertise either in telephony or in software so companies will need to upgrade their IT staff through training and competence development."

With UC, we would be talking about scenarios where users would be able to technically publish only one contact number which could be tagged to their office land line, residential phone as well as mobile. We are talking of a time when a call received on your land line would be automatically saved in your enterprise directory and all numbers accessible from all devices irrespective of the device on which they were saved!