By Heena Jhingan
Unified Communication solutions have come a long way from being a tool to cut travel cost. What are some trends unfolding in the collaboration space vis-à-vis ITeS and BFSI verticals?
The biggest trend across verticals today is video. We have observed that 80% of consumer traffic is video. There has been a significant change in the way video was perceived and consumed as a collaboration tool. We see video becoming more pervasive and going beyond application for conferencing and training. There are emerging areas such as remote healthcare, real time problem resolution and consultancy in banking, PLM in manufacturing, among many others.
This is why Cisco has been innovating around Cisco Telepresence offerings. Interestingly, the users not just want more video. They ask for it in multiple formats, and on different screens, and with greater personalisation capabilities and controls. Service providers are striving to meet these expectations. The operators have made major investments in adding real-time, time-shifted, and on-demand video capabilities to their service offerings.
Another trend that we see is an increasing demand to integrate social networking at work. At Cisco, we have identified collaboration and social networking in the enterprise as the next wave that will drive productivity, innovation, and growth. Our WebEx Social is an enterprise collaboration platform that combines the power of social networking, content creation, and integrates real-time communications tools, including video, voice, IM and WebEx web conferencing. We believe WebEx Social is a excellent solution that can reduce collaboration infrastructure cost and complexity.It can lower licensing, support, and maintenance costs by reducing multiple point solutions. We see new use cases emerging across verticals.
Collaboration is not about just installing hardware. So, what is Cisco doing on this front to enrich the overall collaboration experience?
We are committed to developing better services and products in the collaboration segment. While studying the needs and challenges faced by customers, Cisco took a decision to not offer scaled down versions of enterprise-class products and solutions, but to actually build the entire range of products and solutions from the ground-up. This called for a considerable investment in R&D, but the results have proven that this was the right approach. We reach out to our customers across the world, and in all locations in India through a channel expansive network. This is an ethos we have followed across all our product ranges.
In fact, Cisco recently introduced a number of new TelePresence products and enhancements as part of its collaboration portfolio designed to give these customers new ways to simply, quickly and cost effectively scale TelePresence throughout their organisations. The advancements also enhance ‘any-to-any’ interoperability between Cisco TelePresence endpoints and any standards-based devices, and make the TelePresence experience even more intuitive with user-friendly features and capabilities.
To complement our portfolio of TelePresence offerings ranging from immersive systems to desktop solutions, to PC and Mac software clients such as Movi, we are introducing the Cisco TelePresence MX200. The MX200 is ideal for team meetings or personal offices and priced so that customers can TelePresence-enable many rooms in their organisation.
UC in India has not seen great adoption from an end-to-end solution perspective. What according to you are the key factors behind this?
Most of the organisations have already invested in building considerable amount of communications infrastructure, and are now building the UC solutions on top of that as and when the need arises. The customers are gradually opening up to solutions such as Cisco’s managed and hosted TelePresence service that offers end-to-end solutions, simplified provisioning and scheduling as well as proactive monitoring and management.
The customers demand not only a hosted solution, but they also want to be able to access advanced Cloud-based services for multimedia conferencing and interoperability. We at Cisco, are focused on solving interoperability concerns. I think with UC, and video becoming more pervasive in an organisation, new demands are placed on the network. Traditional IP networks are not well-equipped to deal with these requirements, making delivery and quality of media unpredictable and increasing complexity for network operators and managers. Hence, traditional IP networks need to evolve to accommodate these changes and customers need to take a comprehensive, architectural approach to their video strategy.