Movement is Key

There is a beautiful Sanskrit couplet (sloka) that says
the knowledge that only resides in the book, and the wealth that is with someone
else, have no value because they cannot be used when needed. As businesses
compete more and more on knowledge, there cannot be a better time to look back
at the wisdom of our great seers as they so aptly articulate todays
challenges.

Consider this. Organizations today spend a significant part of
their capital expenditure (and increasingly operational expenditure) on building
world-class IT systems. In India, many of the new generation companies benchmark
against the best in their class globally. They go all out to collect
information, clean it, process it in all ways possible, and by the time they are
able to act on that, it is already outdated!

There was one joke doing the rounds about software a few days
back: if it works fine, it is probably outdated. Many now apply the same to
information. If the information is part of a structured database, probably it is
outdated.

We are not exaggerating. Take a common example. When you want
someone to immediately contact you because you want to buy insurance and you
send an SMS to a short-code advertised by the insurance provider concerned,
there is often no response for a week, or more. But when you are least
interested, you get five calls a day asking you to buy an insurance policy!

In the first case, the company lost business because the people
who should have been able to access that information as soon as you sent the SMS
request had no access till a human intervention put them to the structured
database. And by the time that task was completed, you have already got your
policy. If someone calls you, you are not interested. In fact, as the growing
demand for Do Not Call shows, you are probably irritated. That is loss of
goodwill. So the company loses on both fronts.

If only information would have moved smoothly to the person who
required it most: the sales guy in the insurance company or an agent!

To paraphrase the teaching of the Sanskrit sloka, the
information that remains in a static database has no value because it cannot be
used when needed.

This is not a very uncommon problem. But it is just surprising
how many enterprises actually take it the way it is: a fundamental problem.

Reducing Human Latency

In the real world scenario, when one needs to contact a colleague, she needs
to switch from the application shes working in to an address book and then to
a device (like a telephone) or a different application (such as email).
Thereafter, she would look up her phone extension and give them a call, only to
be directed to their voicemail. After leaving a message, she finds their mobile
phone numbers and leaves a second message and next, sends an email. While from
the organizations perspective, IT struggles to operate an unwieldy mix of
disconnected systems: a PBX system for phone calls, a messaging system for voice
mail, a solution for email, a system for instant messaging and more.

Technologically, there is no breakthrough to make them smoothly
work with each other. The unified communication/intelligent communication
applications available today do that effectively.

"The latency that comes due to delayed human response to
business process alerts is well addressed by the communication enabled business
processes," says Vivek Porwal, head, Unified Communication Business Unit,
Avaya GlobalConnect.

The idea of intelligent communication is to use communication to
connect several processes and integrate infrastructure to make business
processes more efficient and eliminate "human latency" and help
companies raise productivity and respond more rapidly to changing business
conditions.

Since this is one of the biggest business challenges facing
enterprises, this has become a major driver for smarter enterprises. Smart CIOs
are demanding that they have a solution for this from their IT vendors. Not
surprisingly, Microsoft, which dominates the office productivity space has taken
it seriously and has got into a global alliance with Nortel to jointly offer
solutions.

Defining Intelligent Communication

Intelligent Communication or Unified Communication (UC) encompasses all
forms of call and multimedia/cross-media message-management functions,
controlled by an individual user for both business and social purposes. This
includes any enterprise informational or transactional application process that
emulates a human user and uses a single, content-independent personal messaging
channel (mailbox) for contact access.

	"The latency that comes due to delayed human response to business process alerts is well addressed by the communication enabled business processes"
	Vivek Porwal, head, Unified Communication Business Unit, Avaya GlobalConnect

A June 2006 Gartner report clearly points out that the UC market
is maturing rapidly, even though the overall market remains at an early stage
and the adoption of converged solutions remains low. Currently, over 90% of
enterprises that are converging data and voice are on IP networks but in the
next 2-3 years, the transition will happen from IP-based networks. Organizations
will also look at integrating the email infrastructure.

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. Clearly the Indian market is on the radar of most UC
players, and, given the stiff competition in the UC market, most have prepared a
comprehensive business strategy based on specific needs of the different
verticals.

Banking on its recent major acquisitions like Audium, Meteros
and Webex, the networking equipment manufacturer, Cisco, is looking to increase
its UC business by over 40% in India, a major English daily reported recently.
The company has even identified verticals for achieving this growth.

Avaya Global Connect, that includes UC as part of Intelligent
Communication, has opened a customer studio in Mumbai to showcase its products
apart from providing flexible solutions for every vertical and domain expertise
and specific teams to handle specific verticals.

"The potential for the growth of UC is high in India and
with better telecom infrastructure, high bandwidth connectivity through MPLS,
metro Ethernet and broadband, and favorable regulations, enterprise adoption of
UC will soon be on an upward swing," says Sukhvinder Ahuja, Microsoft
Business leader, Nortel India.

Gaining Momentum

As more and more companies are stepping up initiatives to go global, the
competitive landscape is expected to become much more intense and with it the
need for continuous innovation. "There will be rapid acceleration of
business demand capabilities that allow people to communicate and collaborate
across the globe in real time, in the context of business problem or opportunity
or discussion," says Chetan Yardi, country manager, Lotus, SWG IBM India.

UC provides enterprises and their users with faster and quicker
methods of effective communication; thereby enabling enterprises to make
effective decisionssaving time, valuable human resources and increasing
productivity. "While the use of converged communication solutions is
clearly growing, this technology is still in its early stages. However, by using
converged communication solutions, organizations are building the foundation for
a next-generation communication world of potential value-added applications and
collaboration tools," adds Mohit Rampal, country manager, 3Com.

The primary value of using converged IP communications is that
it provides an enterprise-class telephony solution that reduces cost of
ownership and at the same time increasing user productivity with collaboration
tools and enabling business efficiency for todays fast-growing organizations.

Enhancing Employee Productivity

Today any information worker is exposed to several modes of communication
like email, fax, voicemail, telephone, and mobile phone. On the other hand, IT
decision makers have so far been investing in two parallel communication
infrastructures: voice communications through PBXs and email communications
through PCs. Both investments have so far delivered significant business value
to their organizations although this is often fragmented, comprising multiple
applications and hardware from different vendors, and therefore time consuming
and inefficient for employees to use, and also expensive for IT departments
(that must deploy, manage, and update the systems).

Therefore, most market players agree that UC reduces downtime by
letting users reach the right person at the right time through their preferred
mode of contact. This goes way beyond slashing hold times or staying clear of
voice mail. This means organizing information faster and getting that
information to the right person in a usable format when the recipient needs it
most. For instance, the Mumbai-based Chembur Sahkari bank faced the problem of
not being able to dissipate and monitor information or circulars from the RBI to
all its branches from a central location. To increase collaboration in its
working environment, the bank decided to create a new solution based on
Microsoft Office System 2007. The proposed system was to be developed using the
features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for developing the portal
connecting the head office, and all the branches managing operations and the
data centrally from the head office.

UC allows employees to integrate their devices giving the
flexibility to choose the device and delivery of choice, and if integrated with
mail messaging services, the user dials up his mailbox and requests to have his
mails read out to him, and formulates his reply accordingly. "Organizations
should ideally look at a three year plan, identify their immediate needs and
integrate their other needs to enable them to improve their business
processes," says Ahuja of Nortel.

Converged IP communication has now gone to the next level,
beyond VoIP and first generation IP telephony deployments. It is more than just
a basic dial tone; as business advantages are driven by increased productivity
and enhanced collaboration among employees, customers, and partners. These
benefits result from cutting-edge IP-based applications. Unified messaging
offers IP telephony users voice mail/email/fax integration and find me
capabilities. Advanced collaborative applications, such as instant messaging,
presence, and highly scalable audio conferencing capabilities, save time and
effort. IP contact centers help drive customer satisfaction and business
revenues. IP telephony solutions built on open architectures and industry
standards, such as SIP also provide the most flexibility to connect to the
third-party applications the business requires.

Pitching for software-based UC, Vibhu Ranjan, director, UC,
Microsoft India says "the arrival of softwarebased UC is changing the
way enterprises use the convergence of VoIP telephony, email, instant messaging,
mobile communications, and audio/video Web conferencing to deliver a superior
communications platform". Unified communications actually helps information
workers to be in control of their communication thus enabling teams to work
together in real time and increase personal productivity.

Avaya Global Connect, a proponent of Intelligent Communications,
of which UC is a part, believes it makes available to employees all business
communication tools with full features wherever they are and whichever device
they have access to. It keeps people in sync, enabling them to share information
quickly and easily, allows teams to work together from distributed offices,
while on the move, and thereby hastens business decisions. In India, companies
like Marico, Godrej and NIIT Technologies have deployed Microsofts Unified
Communications and have increased employee productivity and efficiency and
reduced overall costs, claims Ranjan.

The Microsoft-Nortel alliance worked with the Mumbai
International airport on their new international airport facility to converge
their telephony and email, resulting in availability and granularity across the
new facility, thus providing a seamless user-friendly experience for their
customers.

Stuti Das

stutid@cybermedia.co.in