Daisy Chittilapilly, VP – ITS, Cisco India & SAARC talked about the company’s ITS business, a sub vertical that is unique to India and how collaboration would shape the next phase of growth for the IT industry. By Heena Jhingan
How have collaboration solutions evolved, especially in the BYOD environments that are starting to emerge even in India?
Earlier collaboration solutions used to stop at telephony and IM. Today, they goes beyond that in terms of connecting all of the content that you have and also improve your decision making capability within the context of enterprises applications.
Though the consumerization of IT and BYOD concepts are becoming popular, Cisco’s framework around collaboration has always been open as we believe that the user should have the same experience across devices. With BYOD becoming popular, mobility is no longer just a good thing to have. It has become a necessity. We have a mobility strategy that includes a product called Jabber from our collaboration portfolio. This software can sit on a desktop or a phone, allowing the user to have an extension of enterprise voice on any of these devices.
Is collaboration becoming popular as a hosted offering?
Currently, the on premises model is more popular. There are clients in healthcare and BFSI who are particular about not getting any of their data on to a Public cloud no matter how safe it might claim to be. Many large enterprises, in some cases even smaller ones, have a flourishing system integration practice. When they go to sell their services, clients are likely to ask if they have used the same within their own enterprise. Audio conferencing is now being accepted as a hosted solution.
Companies can build their own collaboration systems internally, based on our call manager server. We also have a hosted service called managed voice service that provide voice, Web and video on the Cloud. Regulations in specific countries might not be a problem. In terms of cost of ownership, doing it in house might work, depending upon the bouquet of services that a company may use. Regulations and TCO play an important role in the decision.
Is collaboration powered by social media for real?
From the IT perspective, users want all the tools that they use at home. If not the same, they want an equivalent or something better even. The hype around social media is basically due to the unification of voice, video and real time or at convenience communication. It also brings together content and community in corporate workflows and decision making. Employees are asking for a place where everyday activities including making and receiving calls, attending meetings, making comments etc can be conducted online. We have Quad for this. The user has access to all the tools that he uses at his workplace. Social media with real time technologies and content will be quite compelling as opposed to a bulletin board like platform. That’s the way ahead. A lot of IT/ITES companies have built these platforms in the absence of any tailor-made solutions. In some cases, they are embedding our technologies such as voice, video and presence into their systems.
