At a time when the boundaries defining office space and home are blurring, the need for anytime, anywhere collaboration has attained even greater significance. In short, for effective collaboration with geographically dispersed co-workers, partners, and customers companies have been reinventing the use of technology. And this is where real time collaboration has come into play. Its no longer just an internal tool, but it extends to partners and customers as well.

Internet has made possible much richer communication, in the form of real time collaboration, on both wired and wireless infrastructure. Real time collaboration typically means using internet and presence technology to communicate with co-workers irrespective of where they are. It enables people to find peers or decision makers using a single telephone number or Internet address.

The technology integrates tools like e-mail, instant messaging, group chat, desktop sharing, co-browsing, and calendaring applications with communications devices and applications, telephony, wired and wireless; voice messaging; and audio, video, and Web conferencing to do all that and much more.

Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Lotus, SAP, Oracle, Avaya, Siemens, and Alcatel are among some of the leading vendors currently building real-time collaboration capability into their product suites. On the other hand large system integrators and network integrators like Datacraft and Wipro are into actual deployment of these technologies. Datacraft, incidentally, achieved Master Specialization in Unified Communications during FY 2007-08. It also deployed Telepresence in 23 organizations and set up a lab with a Rs 5 crore investment for R&D on realtime collaboration.

Trend in Collaboration
Some of the leading players in the space believe that India is entering into the second phase of Internet usage, where the next major market transition will be driven by collaboration and facilitated by Web 2.0 technologies.

A lot of convergence of voice, video, and data with mobility, that would further enable in-person collaboration and interaction, is another trend that is predicted. At present the latest trends that vendors are exploring include personalization, online collaboration, and adaptivitychanging the online experience to reflect the visitors interests and behaviors.

Currently, the IT/BPO, BFSI, and manufacturing verticals are witnessing wide-scale adoption. However, vendors think most verticals have the potential to use unified communication products as rising mobile workforce, and trends like flexi-timings, which require employees to have anytime, anywhere access, catch on.

Primarily, most organizations platforms support voice and data based solutions, so the market looks lucrative.

While the feelers are strong for a tremendous positive growth, there is no clear direction as to how it will mature. Many believe the market for real time collaboration is still growing and evolving in India.

According to a forecast by Frost & Sullivan on unified communications in India, the total market size stands at approximately $670 mn in 2008 which is likely to grow to more than $1 bn by 2010. A majority of this includes enterprise IP telephony (almost 50%) and applications like presence, mobility. Conferencing and collaboration contribute around 10%. Vendors say the highest growth area is around these applications which add maximum value to end users.

The reasons for the relatively slow adoption of technology could be many. Some new technologies, such as the presence technology, are not fully understood. In other cases best practices around usage are not defined, and also product integration is considered complex. Most significant is the fact that the business case usually is difficult to sell as it is mostly based on soft returns on investment. Looks like vendors will have to push their case a little harder.

Urvashi Kaul
urvashik@cybermedia.co.in

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