The way enterprises use communications technology has come a long way since the early 1970s, when there was a only phone and no PBX, and the anticipated response time used to be about 1-2 days. Enterprises were largely local and their workplaces were confined to the desktop.

In the 1980s, PBX was introduced as the need to reach out gathered momentum and businesses became competitive. The major turning point came in the 1990s, when enterprises got a feel of the Internet and got initiated to the email, further squeezing response time. But it was in mid-2000 that businesses started to become more global with an increase in the number of office locations, thus necessitating a relook into the organizations communication setup. This was also the time when collaborative technologies like instant messaging, social networking, and rich media started to find acceptance, resulting in revolutionizing the way businesses were done.

It is in the light of this changing face of communication that unified communications has the potential to integrate different modes of communication within an enterprise so that they can leverage it to the advantage of the business.

The major challenge before enterprises is to take the quickest possible decisions so that the overall efficiency of the organization can be maintained in view of the cutthroat competition. This becomes even more challenging as companies are going global and having offices in multiple locations.

Planning
Business communication is at the crossroads. There are two primary factors that will accelerate the adoption of unified communications across different enterprise verticals. The first factor is the change in todays business landscape, resulting in workers becoming more global and mobile. According a statistic, last year, workers experienced a 20% increase in emails received on their mobile devices. Besides, technology is more advanced today. Networks are now capable of handling more types of mediafrom voice to video. Processors are getting faster and cheaper, allowing companies to deploy PCs that support video and handle different workloads.

When an enterprise goes about planning for unified communications, it should consider the following:

Streamlined communication: Employees in an organization should be able to access complete communicationsmessaging, voice, fax, conferencing, calendaring, and videowithin applications and devices that people use daily.

Operational efficiency: An enterprise should be able to capitalize on its existing IT investment while planning for unified communications. There should be minimal training cost for users and engineers because of the familiar environment. Additionally, with an open software platform, partners can innovate more rapidly to increase customer choice, and lower costs to address todays communications demands.

Built-in protection: Secure communications and compliance with the government or corporate regulations should be an important consideration for an enterprise while investing in unified communications.

Future-ready foundation: An enterprise should be able to develop a communications foundation that is effectively able to handle future business challenges.

It is important that unified communications should be open standards-based. Some innovative offerings from most vendors include presence-based solution wherein the system knows where the person is and routes the call accordingly.

What is also important is the integration of the applications with systems like SAP, CRM integration, etc. It would be very important to get the applications integrated as that would help the enterprise in completely utilizing its unified communications. But the most important thing is choosing the right system integrator experienced in integrating the total solution.

Moving to IP Telephony
The reason why enterprises should plan to make a smooth move to IP telephony is the advantage it offers in terms of integrating different applications with the communication infrastructure, which will help improve business process. Whether to go for IP or not is tricky, as some enterprises would have made investments in the telephony segment already.

It is entirely possible to integrate a new VoIP network into an old telecom system; for example, if budget is limited or if there is a preservation order on an old building, preventing major work on the structure. Larger organizations will often address the move to IP telephony on a site-by-site basis; sites that have not yet been converted to IP telephony can continue to reuse older systems that are integrated via gateways.

Appropriate telephony engineering can provide near-seamless calling between the old and new systems and can even add new services to the legacy systems such as IP, conferencing, or unified messaging. Some organizations may even choose to provide the new system only to workers who can benefit the most from new capabilities such as multimedia calling and instant messaging.

A 100% IP deployment would surely make their lives easier and simpler, giving IT managers the freedom for more active management along with giving users the reach to larger applications than a hybrid system. Interoperability with other telephony infrastructure is important for integrating all business communications into a seamless and unified experience for customers.

Choosing the Right Vendor
There are two ways to go about it. The first is the end-to-end solution. If the enterprise feels that it is not ready to own and manage the communication portion of the infrastructure, it can go for a professional partner who will manage the entire solution for them and pay the cost of services. The other model is where enterprises can own the infrastructure and go for the best of breed solution, and their own IT team will integrate to run the communications setup.

The method of evaluation of vendors for the two scenarios is different. The enterprise with their own IT setup should look at vendors based on the expertise in the specific communication technology areas with focus on reliability, scalability, and flexibility in adapting to their business needs. The partner who provides the solution should ideally have open standards-based unified communication so that it works in a multi-vendor environment.

It is critical that IT managers look at vendors who not only have a strong product line but also an active deployment site matched with a strong SI experienced in installing and managing the same.

They should look at vendors who can offer a solution that integrates voice mail, email, and fax functions into a single box for easy message retrieval and management in real time, along with optional software connection to third-party PBX and other voicemail systems. They should look forward to be able to deploy UC solutions that not just takes care of their present requirements but also the future needs.

Unified communications solutions should also converge data, voice, and video. Features like speech-to-text and text-to-speech applications, unified voicemail, support for fax delivery to email, multiple phone appearances on an extension, and hard and soft operator consoles and many more should be available. Hosted kind of model can also be considered for some components of services, including audio and videoconferencing. There are videoconferencing solutions that have got simplified and can be easily integrated into the unified communications setup.

A serious look at the vendors who have a deployment in the country matched with a strong SI capable of integrating the entire solution would play an important role. Technology investments are looked at more from a business, strategic point of view today than from mere IT requirements. Today, companies look for partners with interoperable systems both at the front end and the back end. Therefore, it is important that vendors collaborate to give a seamless experience to the customer and meet their diverse needs. Above all, the solution should be scalable, reliable, secure, and user friendly. Also, enterprises, instead of just looking at the cost, should look at the larger objective of incurring that cost and whether the vendor is really going to deliver on promises.

Return on Investment
There are tangible benefits that an enterprise can look at from the RoI perspective. Integration of applications across the enterprise would have a cost attached today, but the benefits of being always available, along with easy availability of data at the touch, would pay off. Unified communications would also help organizations in the effective utilization of its resources, besides bringing down communications cost.

Sudesh Prasad
sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in

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