BANGALORE, INDIA: Today's organizations are largely global in nature with the workforce being mobile and virtual. In the present environment, it is important for employees to stay connected and collaborate, says Chandru K., Business Manager (Converged Communications Services) at IBM India.

In an interview with Manu Sharma of CIOL Bureau, he spoke on the challenges faced by enterprises and the steps a CIO needs to ensure success of converged communication systems.

CIOL: Role of IBM in Converged Communications?
Chandru K: IBM offers a suite of assessment, design, deployment, integration and managed services to deliver converged communications solutions. IBM offers a uniquely flexible and broad portfolio of services, software and financing capabilities that can be easily customized to address specific needs required to support communications for a diverse and global workforce.

These capabilities are backed by the experience and technical know-how required to provide smooth, successful unified communications and collaboration deployments. Working with a broad network of partners and suppliers (device manufacturers, network equipment vendors, telecommunication service providers and independent software vendors), IBM can offer an extensive range of skills and solutions to meet the client's immediate and long-term business needs for converged communication solutions.
 
CIOL: What are the present challenges in communication that the enterprises are facing and what does Converged Communications help address/solve?
CK: Organizations are largely global in nature with workforce being mobile and virtual. The focus for organizations is to improve their bottom line that means they are focused on employee productivity. It is important for employees to stay connected and collaborate.

Typical challenges are:
* Communication-caused delay and disruption is a pervasive business problem.
* Communications complexity affects long-term productivity, business process reform, and financial performance.
* Decision support outcomes suffer from the inability to access and collaborate effectively with primary players. * Resources are improperly used or misallocated because of the complexity of communication.

Converged Communications helps address these challenges and streamline communications.

CIOL: What do you accomplish by deploying Converged Communications, in the short and long terms?
CK: Converged Communications with its emerging class of applications and services helps improve communications. It helps businesses in simplifying communications for their mobile and distributed workforce to improve communication flows, access primary decision makers quickly, enhance collaboration, and improve productivity to positively affect their business. They speed access and improve communication, integrate different device modes and communication applications, and dramatically improve collaboration, allowing organizations to streamline business processes, reach the right resource the first time, and enhance profitability. 

CIOL: What are the steps a CIO needs to prioritize to ensure success of Converged Communication systems?
CK: Firstly take a step back and do an assessment of the opportunities What do I spend on tools today? What are my opportunities for savings? And then do a business evaluation. Given those opportunities I uncover, how will I leverage those against my business processes?

Then, a very, very important step and that is to do a network assessment. Is my network ready? And if not, take the step, which is to get the network ready for voice deployments. And when we say network-readiness, we're talking about things such as what sort of network latency do I see in my data network? What are the jitter characteristics of my network? How much bandwidth do I have? And very, very importantly, have I implemented quality of service?  

Beyond those steps, customers need to begin to prepare themselves to develop the skills necessary and really to begin to bring together skills between their traditional telephony groups and their data networking groups. And, of course, once you've gotten to that point, then it's time to move into the design and implementation phases. 

CIOL: What are the differences between Unified Communications and Unified Messaging?
CK: Unified Communications enables people to find peers or decision makers using a single telephone number or Internet address. It integrates e-mail, instant messaging, and calendaring applications with communications devices and applications—telephony—wired and wireless; voice messaging; and audio, video, and Web conferencing.

Unified Communications applications support advanced presence-sensitivity and find-me capability, and media independence. They are easy to use, with a familiar intuitive interface linked to powerful functions. Finally, they provide voice access to applications and data.

While, Unified Messaging is a subset or one of the Unified Communications applications, Unified Messaging is the integration of different messaging (voice, email and fax) into a single or Unified Message store. They can access this through a variety of devices. Since these are integrated it makes it easier for users to access their message store. For e.g., they can access their voice, fax and email messages through a single touch point, their emails.