Unified Communications: the future beckons

By Lavanya Palani Batcha

Lavanya Palani Batcha of Frost & Sullivan discusses the latest trends in unified communications.

Emergence of UC

Enterprise Communications is increasingly being considered as a means to achieve several critical objectives in an enterprise. Increasing productivity, higher efficiency, faster turn-around times, enhanced client interaction, quicker ROIs, and significant reduction in long-term costs are some of these mission-critical objectives. In trying to achieve these business goals, enterprises need to overcome several limiting factors such as cut-throat competition, multiplicity of devices, communication over multiple remote locations, lack of infrastructure, unsatisfied clients, and even the current state of the economy.

Advancements in technology, products, and applications, and the growth of Internet Protocol (IP) networks have given birth to the unified communications (UC) story, which is considered by many as an integral platform in the future of enterprise communications.

Unified communications defined

The proliferation and adoption of the IP telephony platform by enterprises serve as the principal thrust for unified communications. In the simplest of terms unified communications is the convergence of voice, data, and video networks on an IP system.

Frost & Sullivan's unified communications definition and framework includes a wide range of applications as explained below:

• Enterprise telephony: Includes KTS, WPBX, PBX, IP-PBX systems, IP phones, and digital phones
• E-mail: Includes e-mail and related calendaring software licenses
• Unified client: Includes software clients, which provide instant messaging capabilities and/or the ability to launch other unified communications applications such as IP Telephony and conferencing and collaboration with presence awareness
• Unified messaging: Includes applications which integrate the storage and accessibility of voice, fax, and e-mail messages into a single mailbox, which can be accessed through e-mail, telephone, web browser or a unified client. It also includes sales of voice mail systems as they form an addressable opportunity for unified messaging solutions
• Conferencing and collaboration: Includes audio, video, and web conferencing, and collaboration tools that enable the communications and sharing of information, files, and presentations in real time
• Presence: Includes middleware applications, which provide a real-time status indicator of a user's ability and willingness to communicate through different communication tools within a network or enables integration of multiple unified communications applications
• Mobility: Includes middleware applications and soft clients, which enable the delivery of corporate desktop and voice communications through mobile devices
• Contact center applications such as Automatic Call Dialing (ACD), Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), outbound and multimedia Systems: Includes product license sales of customer facing applications in the contact center

Potential across Industries

Enterprises that have offices across multiple locations with a large mobile workforce needing real-time collaboration between customers, colleagues, business partners, etc., are likely to enjoy the best use of unified communications. Industries that generally have an inclination towards the use of high-end technology are also expected to be able to gauge the underlying long-term benefits of implementing unified communications in their premises.

The potential for the adoption of unified communications exists across industry verticals such as manufacturing, hospitality, aviation, etc. The requirements for each vertical are unique and the essence of unified communications is such that it can

cater to a specific need in each of them. The hospitality segment, constantly in search of avenues for greater customer satisfaction, is likely to benefit greatly from unified communications. Rich interactive user experience provided by IP telephony, the seamless voice and data connectivity through the mobility application for the hotel's mobile staff, and other innovative facilities are expected to prove to be features offering immense benefits.

Emerging trends

The integration of unified communications and critical enterprise business processes such as CRM, ERP, etc., is seen as a development, which would enable enterprise customers to view unified communications as a significant value proposition.

In the context of contact centers, the deployment of unified communications can result in a marked improvement in the productivity of the agents. They would have the provisions to be seamlessly connected through voice, video, IM, and email to their supervisors and associates on one side and customers on the other. These inherent advantages of unified communications are likely to facilitate the agents to perform multi-tasking. If agents can significantly diminish the time taken for their transactions, then it presents a case where the investment in the technology can be justified.