Obliterating Distance

Unified Communications as a Software (UCaaS)
is one of the emerging services, which will
rapidly grow the deployment of unified communication and collaboration solutions in the Indian market, especially in the small-and medium-end of the market.

The Indian market is currently in a nascent stage and there are few service providers who are currently evaluating, and evolving solutions bundled along with bandwidth to offer value-added services to enterprise-end customers.

A study by Frost & Sullivan reveals that the total size of the UC market in India is likely to grow more than $1 billion by the end of 2010. At a time when cutting costs and improving business processes seem to be key challenges across industry, convergence of technologies in the form of UC becomes all the more essential. Solution providers are looking at the recession as a big opportunity for the unified communications market.

According to Minhaj Zia, National Sales Manager-Unified Communications, Cisco India and SAARC, “Instant messaging and real-time collaboration tools will emerge as the primary communications methods, surpassing e-mail. Companies will evolve beyond typical voice calls, or even basic click-to-talk functionality of soft phones and instant messaging clients and integrate new voice capabilities into innovative new business processes. Interoperability and open standards will continue to evolve and help break down barriers between disparate communications systems."

Recession temporarily dipped the growth curve of UC market in India, as most enterprises became sceptical of investing in future technologies and survival became more crucial. The recession, however, was only a temporary setback, from a
bad 2009 the UC market in India has bounced back. In the last two-three quarters, there has been
an uptake from the previous year, industry players peg the growth to be anywhere between
30-40 percent YoY.

The market trends currently in this year is the global value chains, mobile workforces, social networking, pervasive video, and information overload. To address these business complexities, UC is a concept that connects people, information, and teams, helping to enable comprehensive and effective collaborative experiences.

According to Raghu Kumar, CEO, GlobalOutlook, “These days, companies are increasingly expecting their employees to be capable by consolidating a number of services onto standard data networks. By integrating different methods of communication, such as desktop handsets, voice mail, fax, e-mail, instant messaging, conferencing, laptops and mobile devices, it becomes easier to manage all these devices and applications from a single point, and access them using common devices. Thus, UC ensures communication for any person all the time and from anywhere."

With SMBs emerging in the Indian business landscape and the recessionary dust settling down, UC solutions are poised to grow. As vendors are yet to offer a complete end-to-end on-premise solution, budget-constrained businesses hold the key for growth of the UC market. Besides, UC is now being offered in cloud-SaaS, which will enable most of the SMBs adopting UC and save lot of capex.

The Master of all trades

Of late, the deployment of UC solutions is not just restricted to large system integrators or service providers. Even the relatively smaller solution providers have jumped into the bandwagon, including the likes of Chennai-based Gemini Communications. The company brings varied expertise and experience of implementing several UC projects in India.

Amongst the major deployments undertaken by Gemini, the ones that stands out are the videoconferencing installation at the Doorma India, network video inter-connectivity at Vizag, and the videoconferencing imple-mentation at the Naval Dockyard.

The project at Doorma involved five Sony videoconference devices to be configured in five different locations (Chennai, Pune, Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru) by coordinating with the client and engineers present on-site at these locations. The connectivity for the locations was integrated using Dax routers configured for MPLS-VPN network provided by Aircel. The WAN and LAN segment IP's were given by Aircel and the client respectively for each router present in different locations. The LAN segment IP already present at remote locations was changed to allow local LAN traffic through MPLS-VPN to reach Chennai servers. A separate route was added in each device in remote locations to allow Internet through their available Internet bandwidth.

"Till date, UC solutions in the cloud have provided a great way for enterprises to enhance their users' communications and productivity. Users are better able to manage powerful applications such as VoIP/telephony services, collaboration, unified messaging and voicemail through a unified interface to make certain workers do not miss important meetings, messages and ideas,” added Krishna Kumar, Chief Marketing Officer, Gemini Communications.

Meanwhile, Gemini is keen on investing in the same. Currently, it is focusing in the Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi and Hyderabad and further plans to take UC in the tier-II cities and other markets as well.

Another solution provider, OmniTel Technologies, believes that Theoretically, unified communications technologies are supposed to help improve employee collaboration, productivity and customer service, and provide a way for IT departments to reduce operating costs. However, in order to implement UC, companies need to go through both technological and organizational change and these two things don't necessarily happen at the same pace.

The Champ

After analyzing the success stories of the solution providers in the UC space, one name that
clearly stands out is Gemini Communications. The company has the vision of creating innovative and flexible solutions that offer its customers
a competitive advantage and help them meet their business goals.

MINAKSHI SHETTY
(minakshis@cybermedia.co.in)