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For any enterprise trying to compete globally, seamless communications is increasingly becoming the key to improving business processes. Add to this, the convergence of communication technologies, and you get to the hot new buzzword in the technology landscapeunified communications or UC.

While the market adoption of unified communications is currently slow, trend watchers paint a bright future. The arrival of unified communications signals the beginning of the convergence of VoIP telephony, email, instant messaging, mobile communications, and audio-video Web conferencing into a single platform that shares a common directory, and common developer tools. UC also takes advantage of standard communication protocols such as SIP (session initiation protocol) to route communications to right the people on the right device.

This coming together of communications and technology presents a lucrative market of close to $40 bn worldwide. Reasons for slow adoption of technology are plenty. While some new technologies like Presence are not fully understood, best practices around usage are not defined. Also, the product integration is considered complex. Most important is the fact that the business case usually becomes difficult to communicate, and is usually based on a soft RoI.

A Gartner report released in June 2006, points out that the UC market and its technology are maturing rapidly, but overall the market remains at an early stage, and the adoption of converged solutions remains slow.

The communication patterns of most enterprises in the next three to five years will be indicators to where the market is headed. While the outlook is of a tremendous positive growth, there is no clear direction on how it will mature.

Over 90% of enterprises that are converging data and voice are currently on IP networks. In the next two to three years, the transition will happen from IP- based networks, and also organizations will look at integrating the email infrastructure too. While the PBX infrastructure in India is close to $290 mn, eventually, the market will move towards IP- based infrastructure, which is close to a $108 mn market.

The largest single value of unified communications lies in its ability to reduce human latency in business processes. Historically, companies have expected significant employee productivity improvements by offering employees a unified message box to access email, voice mail, SMS, teletex, and fax from multiple points of interaction. The POIs are fixed phones, mobile or cellular phones, PCs, and PDAs.

The market size approximations (for 2003-07) have been divided into three segments: enterprise sales ($100-200 mn), service provider products ($100-200 mn), and service provider services ($300-500 mn). Across these segments, a transformation in technology is taking place that promises to fill the value gap that currently exists in systems. This transformation is the evolution of UM (Unified Messaging) to UC. The new features in UC are making the business case more compelling.

Urvashi Kaul
urvashik@cybermedia.co.in

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