A unifying experience

Merging communication channels using cutting edge technologies can help organizations enhance process and HR efficiencies. Here’s how some Indian companies are experimenting with unified communication systems

By KTP Radhika

BITS Pilani, one of the leading private universities in India, has four campuses located across the globe – at Pilani in Rajasthan, Dubai, Goa and in Hyderabad. It employs 700 full-time staff and has 11,000 on-campus and 19,000 off-campus students. For pedagogic as well as administrative reasons, BITS needed to connect these different campuses smoothly. Without a unified connection, BITS had faced problems with campus placements because the same company had to visit different campuses multiple times. Also, when an alumni or a dignitary came visiting, students in all the campuses could interact with them or benefit from their talks. Additionally, guest lecturers from abroad could not be facilitated in all the campuses at the same time.

To overcome these challenges and to facilitate a next generation learning experience, BITS launched BITSConnect 2.0, a multi-million dollar project that leverages Cisco’s collaboration portfolio to enhance interaction across its campuses. Cisco’s immersive telepresence, high definition video conferencing and Webex technologies were chosen to be part of the integrated solution.

That has changed things like never before. BITS has been able to facilitate knowledge transfer in real time more efficiently. Faculty and staff meetings are now conducted through multi-party voice conferencing and the university is able to make multi-campus classroom teaching with the help of high-definition telepresence with multiway HD video. One teacher can interactively address students across all campuses and any student can ask a question real time. “This deployment has facilitated a highly interactive multi-site collaborative learning environment at BITS,” says Rahul Banerjee, who is a Professor of computer science at BITS. “It has also helped us foster innovation, enhance productivity and streamline administration.” While promoting on-demand learning, it helps BITS to build relationships with industry partners, government agencies, research organizations, educational institutions and alumni from across the globe.

BITS is not the only organization to experiment with such unified communication (UC) systems. What it has done is just another instance of advanced UC deployment in India. Like in the case of BITS, unified communication is now becoming a game changer in organizations across verticals in India.

For instance, IT firm iGate wanted seamless communication between employees and clients at different locations to share and process information swiftly and reliably. To facilitate that, iGate deployed a UC system leveraging the existing Microsoft Lync 2010. Chella Namasivayam, CIO, iGate, explains: “The deployment of Lync as the end point client interface provided unified access to all users on the intranet. This meant users were able to connect from any device – be it their laptops, mobile phones or over the web; from anywhere and anytime as long as they were connected to the Internet.”

The user interface was significantly enhanced, which resulted into better user experience and increased employee efficiency and productivity. It also boosted employee morale and satisfaction. “Unified services such as instant messaging, data sharing, audio conferencing and video conferencing now happen through a single-window application and provide a uniform experience to users both on premises and off-premises,” says Namasivayam. “Further, the solution supports iGate’s outcome-based delivery approach, which requires all interaction between the customer and onsite as well as offsite teams to be productive and result-oriented. It met the company’s need to get disparate systems to talk to each other on a homogenous platform.”

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. Research firm Frost & Sullivan notes that the size of the UC market in the Asia Pacific region is expected to rise from $4.3 billion in 2010 to $6.5 billion by 2015. Globally the market is growing at a rate of 15-20% year-on-year. Reports say that over the past four years, Indian enterprises have been estimated to spend over $1.5 billion in hardware and software solutions related to UC.

Himanshu Goyal, Country Manager, Social Business & Collaboration Solutions, IBM, says, “Twenty years ago, telephones, face-to-face meetings and travel were how people collaborated. In today’s world, interactions with colleagues, customers and partners are, by necessity, much more complex and fluid. With high-speed Internet and high-speed Internet services available across the country, businesses now understand the potential of UC.”
Organizations today are looking at reducing their spends on travel and, at the same time, enhancing the collaboration and easing the flow of information among their workforce based out of different geographical areas. Better collaboration is helping companies execute business strategies, compete and differentiate in businesses and deal with the rapidly evolving market.

Naveen Chopra, Director, Vodafone Business Services, says, “Large enterprises started adopting UC a few years ago, but the benefits of the collaborative technology have been successful in attracting mid-market segments and small enterprises in India. The key factors for this growth are the increased adoption of mobile devices, cloud-based voice solutions and video conferencing.”

Vertical deployments

Major sectors such as government and public sector organizations, IT/ITeS, banking and manufacturing are adopting UC and collaboration technologies in a big way. Organizations have started realizing that they can streamline their business processes and boost productivity, reliability and competitiveness. “While IT/ITeS and BFSI segments were the primary adopters, we are also seeing a lot of interest in verticals beyond ITeS,” says Minhaj Zia, Director, Collaboration Sales, Cisco India & SAARC. “There is an increased usage of UC solutions in the public sector, hospitality, judiciary, healthcare and the pharmaceutical industry.”

For instance, many of the healthcare organizations across the country are adopting and leveraging various UC solutions that can consolidate systems and solve communications challenges encountered on a daily basis. Such applications improve workflow and collaboration between clinicians and administrative staff, yielding increased productivity and efficiency in healthcare. With a good collaborative tool, all communication can be stored and archived to the cloud to become part of the patient’s record for future use.

Banking and financial sectors have traditionally been major adopters and the trend is only expected to continue. According to Purshottam Purswani, CTO, Atos India, “Banking has evolved rapidly over the last couple of years. This has resulted in complex process flows that often require employees of departments to communicate with each other to avoid delays or discuss compliance issues.” He says that deploying solutions such as UC can surely improve employee productivity and increase collaboration. Many big enterprises such as Mahindra & Mahindra in the automobile manufacturing sector are using UC for streamlining operations, improving productivity, innovation and shortening time to market. It also helps in gaining deep visibility into supply chains, minimizes the time to rework processes, and enhances communication with employees.

Hospitality is another key growth industry with applications such as self-service, video-enabled kiosks and UC networks. Vendors such as Cisco (Cisco Connected Hotel and Hospitality solutions), Polycom (Hospitality industry solutions), and NEC (unified messaging solutions) have specialized solutions for this booming sector.

Another major sector is the government. “UC tools not only connect various government bodies, but also offer closer and secured administration. The concept is over a decade old and has been very well adopted by Western governance bodies. In India, too, the government is making investments in sectors such as medicine, education, police and military. Even various ministries and states are taking advantage of UC capabilities,” states Neeraj Gill, Managing Director, India and SAARC, Polycom.

UC will help the government, especially for its e-governance and m-governance initiatives. Sanjeev Verma, President, Global Sales & Business Operations, AGC Networks, feels that the government has become one of the biggest adopters of UC. “It is imperative for the government to invest in UC solutions in order to build a good network with the governing bodies at state levels. State governments like Gujarat are well ahead in this.” (See box)

Another area where UC is finding a lot of takers is the small and medium sector. The growing interest among SMEs for hi-tech UC facilities has triggered hope among leading vendors. Major players like Cisco, Microsoft, Avaya and Polycom have their own SME portfolios. There are also players like LifeSize who are eying mostly the SME sector. LifeSize had recently introduced the Icon 600 HD video system with an integrated universal video collaboration (UVC) manager. “The SMB market is price sensitive. They need low-cost, easy-to-use solutions. Since most enterprises have already purchased equipment for video conferencing, the SMB market is going to drive growth for video from an infrastructure perspective,” informs Deepak Braganza, Country Manager, LifeSize India & South Asia.

Technologies calling
With the advancement in technology, a set of new tools and technologies are reshaping the UC sector. For example, familiar technologies such as telephony, messaging and conferencing are being supplemented by rapidly developing communications architectures. Purswani of Atos India comments, “Applications based on fast-moving networking technologies such as mobility, presence and session initiation protocol (SIP) are changing the UC sphere in a big way. These will facilitate deeper use of UC as an aid in improving productivity and automating business processes.”

Industry experts say that communications applications such as workflow or communications-enabled business process (CEBP) will also increasingly invoke UC applications such as presence, conferencing or contact center services to leverage smartphones, tablets and web services in routine business. 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 is also becoming a larger part of vendors’ overall UC and collaboration offerings as organizations continue to push for video as part of their UC initiatives.

Many modern enterprise technology trends are helping the UC business prosper. Mobility, for example, is playing a strong part in re-shaping how people communicate and collaborate. The adoption of BYOD, too, is driving consumerization of UC. 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. “Mobile UC allows better management of time and makes communications rich and informative. Upon adding the mobility aspect to UC, productivity goes up exponentially. It’s a boon for functions such as healthcare, financial services, and consumer-facing or process-driven businesses and other communication-intensive activities,” explains Goyal of IBM.

Apart from mobility and BYOD adoption, enterprise social networking, video conferencing and VoIP are key drivers that are pushing UC adoption. Cisco’s Zia elaborates, “Over the long term, opportunities exist to design entirely new businesses and approaches using mobility, such as virtual manufacturing, virtual meetings, virtual logistics or new modes of operations, such as office-less businesses. UC and its component technologies are speeding-up businesses on their path to going green while reducing carbon-heavy overheads.”

Polycom’s Gill states, “Companies are looking to successfully integrate social media into their traditional sales, service and support channels which can open up the conversation in new and exciting ways.” Another trend that is driving the UC market is virtualization. Most organizations have virtualized many applications and servers in their data centers. With today’s mature solutions, companies can virtualize communications and collaboration applications without concerns about the impact to smooth business operations.

On top of the cloud
UC-as-a-Service (UCaaS) is showing strong growth in India. According to Frost & Sullivan, it is expected to grow 23.3% between 2011 and 2016, and will become a $261.1 million market. “The cloud-based conferencing services market has doubled in the past 5 years, and is expected to double again in the next six years. Among the UC services, hosted contact center and email opportunities are gaining strong interest,” says Somenath Nag, Director – Business Development & Marketing, Alten Calsoft Labs.

By integrating UC with the cloud, an organization can enable its users to be productive round the clock regardless of their presence. Businesses can leverage cost-effective and scalable cloud environment, which will be able to deliver services on demand through virtualization. The pay-as-you-go model helps the customers keep a tighter lid on the cost of doing business and their expenditure on a service.

Explains K.P. Unnikrishnan, APAC Marketing Director of Brocade Communications: “Cloud-based UC will offer unmatched simplicity by removing architectural complexity and reducing operational and management costs. It also provides a new level of network scalability, uptime and performance through non-stop networking.”

Though the UCaaS solution is just taking off in the Indian market, this area could attract a lot of interest in the near future. The SMB market is keen to take up UC. As of now, it is primarily on IP telephony or voice conferencing as different components. The realization of end-to-end UC solutions for SMBs will be more on top of the cloud.

Unification challenges
UC platforms are increasingly being accepted by large enterprises which have offices across various geographical locations. However it has not been adopted largely by SMBs. Also, many of the enterprises have accepted the technology only in bits and pieces rather than as an end-to-end solution.

One of the major limitations to UC adoption is the issue of interoperability between multi-vendor UC platforms that exist within an enterprise. “Not all phones, gateways, call managers are interoperable as they support some proprietary variant of a standard protocol. This limits enterprises from a free mix and match of components. The usage of open standards can tackle this issue,” opines Gill.
Another great challenge is how to choose the best-fit solution. Lack of knowledge about the best UC solutions and vendors is a big hindrance. Bandwidth issues are also causing blocks in the path of UC adoption. Poor connectivity is a major problem especially in the rural market of India.

Despite these multiple issues that need to be sorted out, industry experts foresee a bullish market for UC. “As new applications and delivery models are introduced, the industry is expected to move toward a unified collaborative approach in its true sense by using newer technologies such as cloud computing, mobility and 4G telecom networks. The successful roll-out of 4G networks in India will be the tipping point in UC adoption in India,” says Nag of Calsoft. With a huge geographical territory to cover and with increasing mobile workforce, Indian enterprises will adopt UC as a strategic tool in the coming days. And increased smartphone adoption, cloud-based UC solutions and improved telecom networks will make this adoption easier and faster.

Industry experts believe that virtual workplace will become the rule rather than the exception for  enterprises of tomorrow. BYOD will replace desk phones and desktop computers, and social networking tools and virtual world meeting experiences will simulate the feeling of “being there” in person. Work models will be changed by expanded globalization and green business initiatives will drive more and more UC deployments.

“Definition of meetings will radically transform and become increasingly ad-hoc and instantaneous, based on context and need. 3-D virtual world will significantly influence online corporate meeting experiences to deliver more life-like experiences demanded by the next-generation workers who will operate more efficiently in this familiar environment,” visualizes IBM’s Goyal.