MUMBAI, INDIA: After great success and popularity among business heads in New Delhi and Bangalore, the last leg of Consilium CXO UC Forum 2009 was hosted in Mumbai on Thursday.

The unified communication dedicated meet in its second year is the hallmark event of Singapore based Consilium Software Inc, a unified communication solution provider.

The forum discussed unified communication in India, its various aspects in businesses and organizations. Also the CXOs debated on the applications of unified communication in social networks such as instant messenger (IM) and Skype.

Moreover, the discussion revolved around the benefits of unified communications and applications as means to cost reductions and business growth.

Addressing the forum, Pramod Ratwani, Consilium's president and executive chairman said, "In last 100 years, since the invention of telephone by Graham Bell, there's a constant change in communication. With computing becoming more available today, there's more collaboration of applications with voice, video, email, fax and web."

About unified communication, Ratwani explained, "It is basically to bring together multiple communication systems, devices and applications to deliver seamless communication experience." He added that the technology is aimed to improve decision making in business.

While, according to Venu Venugopal, Cisco's director – Customer Business Transformation, collaboration is among the top five priority of Cisco out of 26 priorities. "We are at inflection point, where things are changing- the way people work today is changing. Technological, societal, competitive, legal and business/financial are five important trends of collaboration," he said.

On the challenging economy he commented that today, employees needs to be provided with information that helps retention using blogs, wikis and web 2.0 interactive applications within the organizations. "Collaboration is the platform for business and network is the platform of collaboration using unified communication.

Similarly, Minhaj Zia, Cisco's head – Unified Communication & Contact Center called the current scenario as "perfect storm" and stressed that collaboration within organization and outside is required to get over the storm in the business environment.

In terms of India, Ish Anand, You Telecom's head – Customer Care Network Services Department commented that unified communication is the future and slowly its presence is increasing in the country and prominently in the area of educations and services.

Moreover, C Guruprasad, Verity Analytics' director remarked, "Though unified communication is prominently used by enterprises in India, it's partially used in areas of education and training purposes."

Overall, the panel strongly advocated for use of unified communication technology as business enabler and means to reduce cost in the slowdown. About 30-odd business heads and tech experts across businesses remained present during the meet.