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NextGen to favor flexi work

Datacraft research reveals that organizations are realizing the potential of UC to increase employee productivity

<b>Dheeksha Rabindra</b>

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

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BANGALORE, INDIA: Many organizations in the US and Asia, especially in India, are motivated to offer flexible working and ubiquitous communication tools to retain employees and improve productivity, according to a study conducted by Datacraft, a provider of IT services and solution, and research firm Dimension Data on Unified Communication (UC).

"Working from home or while on the move, most IT professionals would prefer to have such flexible working environment and ubiquitous communication tools. Flexi-work will become a prerequisite for the next generation of corporate workers. Seamless connectivity and unified communication facilitates such flexible working environment," says Nagi Kasinadhuni, general manager, Unified Communication, Datacraft, while talking to CyberMedia News.

The research reveals that organizations are realizing the potential of UC to increase employee productivity while offering their employees flexible working opportunities.

Globally, productivity remains the critical driver behind organizations' investment in UC.

The survey covered over 390 IT managers and 524 users globally.

According to the report around 43 per cent of the organizations offer flexible working and active IT support for its employees. The organizations that don't offer flexible working constitute 33 per cent and those offering flexible working but not IT support constitute 24 per cent.

Many enterprises would like to offer VoIP telephony or soft phone, indicating that these technologies are very much a focus of enterprise flexible working and convergent communication strategy, the study reveals.

Communication technologies usage pattern

The survey also covered the usage of patterns communication technologies. Communications technologies include email, fixed line telephone, mobile telephony, application sharing, mobile push email, audio conferencing, instant messaging, unified messaging and soft phone.

Globally, research shows that e-mail has overtaken telephony as a communication tool in the workplace. All the organizations offer email, fixed line telephone, mobile telephony facilities.

All (100 per cent) of the end-users surveyed use e-mail, followed by fixed-line telephony (80 per cent), mobile telephony (76 per cent) and instant messaging (66 per cent).

The research shows that instant messaging, blogs and soft phones can become disruptive and can negatively impact productivity if not managed properly.

New technologies such as mobile push, e-mail, unified messaging and soft phone are currently on the investment agenda, and will become more widely used in the workplace, the study revealed.

Although mobile VoIP is not widely used, corporates are mulling investment in this segment in next two years.

Talking about IP telephony infrastructure penetration, Kasinadhuni said, "IP telephony usage in India will double in the next two years and it will become the main agenda of the enterprises."

The findings show that organizations view click-to-dial on desktops (52 per cent), and presence (42 per cent) as maturing technologies, which will be routinely used in the corporate environment within two years.

DataCraft roadmap

"Going forward we see more UC, collaboration and more of visual communication technologies. Voice over is growing in the market. However, we are focusing lot on visual communication and collaboration," Kasinadhuni said.

"Today clients are looking at UC from business and ROI perspective than for flaunting the technology. Clients have moved away from cost advantage and management looks at UC's impact on business benefits than impact on cost," he said.

Kasunadhuni said that the company's strategy is to be more aggressive in UC. "We are investing lot on services and both in integration and consulting. And on operational side and we are going to position this to our clients. Obviously there are leaders like Microsoft, Nokia and Cisco, but the real value to the client is bringing all the market leaders together," he said.

UC masters are another huge investment for us and we are investing more on resources and in telepresence, he said.

In India the company has over eight installations and seven members trained for delivering telepresence. Many more telepresence installations are slated for this year.

He added that the company is planning to have different go-to-market model and plans to tie-up with service providers to tap a different segment that could be education, government or SME.

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