BANGALORE, INDIA: Unified Communications is the key to future. Adopting unified communications helps enterprises to not only cut operational costs, but also improve customer services, any essential requirement to make an impression in the market. This was the opinion experts who participated in the one-day Consilium CXO-Exclusive Unified Communications Forum 2009 meeting.

The meeting came up with a range of questions about adopting UC ranging from: Is India ready for UC?, Can Cisco's UC be integrated by Microsoft UC solutions? How can you address security threats in a SaaS environment?, etc.

The experts answered one by one and made it clear that UC has come to stay, and the early adopters may benefit, while late adopters lose the advantage of making a big impact.

Is India ready for UC ?
Ashvani Srivastava, CEO, Health Highway, felt that while adopting UC is still looked as an additional investment, it can actually benefit an organization in more than one way.

He observed that for India Inc., it was time to get incubated to the UC environment. Many organizations look at investments in technology with a view point of making profit in short time but technologies like UC has to be viewed with a long term perspective, he opined.

The big issue?
Ten years ago, when UC products first rolled out, connectivity was a major issue! However, what is the real issue now?

Experts said in this time business transformation throughout the world the biggest issue before UC vendors is to find ways for make their products integrate with the various processes of an organization. Any UC product cannot be sucessful or deliver benifits to the customer unless it can intergrate with various processes and tools and should be easy to use.

It was suggested that it now time for enterprises to stop investing in old technologies and look at adopting a suitable architecture for using UC products.

3G and UC
In reply to a query on the likely impact of introduction of 3G services in India by Pramod Ratwani, President of Consilium, who was also the moderator of the program, Minhaj Zia of Cisco noted that 3G services is being introduced by MTNL in Delhi and Mumbai, and soon the services are expected to be introduced in other cites of India.

The introduction of 3G services will pave way for more usage of videos and this will be a driver of UC products as videos can play an important role in Customer care Services of the future.

SaaS and security
In reply to concerns expressed by several CXOs on safety of adopting UC under SaaS model, experts like N. Gajapathi admitted that information security and connectivity were areas of concern under the SaaS model.

Minhaj Zia, Head UC and Contact Center, Cisco, maintained that all Cisco UC products guaranteed cent percent protection of Information and security of Cisco products come with third party certification.

Cisco vs. Microsoft
In reply to doubts expressed about seamless integration of Cisco UC products in a Microsoft environment, Venu Venugopal, Director, Customer Business Transformation, Cisco, sought to ally such fears by stating that efforts were on to make Cisco UC products work with Microsoft products too.

Speaking to CIOL on the sidelines of the CXO forum meet, the Cisco director said there were some issues with Microsoft, as the latter too has UC products. He added that Cisco was already in talks with Micorsoft to sort out the issue and an announcement can be expected in about three months time.

N. Gajapathi, CEO, who was another panelist, remarked that it was encouraging to note that Cisco and Microsoft are already in consultation to sort out the issue. It is still the early stage of UC adoption and sorting out such issues can send the right signals to the industry, he felt.