INDIA: Any enterprise intending to leave footprints on the global roadmap obviously cannot ignore the absolute need for improving business processes in order to enable a seamless communication flow. But are these best times to talk about upgrading technology or starting off afresh for the enterprises, that are already reeling under that global recession? Interestingly, it is the time that offers maximum opportunity say industry pundits.

At a time when cutting costs and improving business processes seem to be key challenges across industry, convergence of technologies in the form of unified communications becomes all the more essential.

Solution providers are looking at the recession as a big opportunity for the unified communications market. Amit Mehra from Microsoft reiterates the point; The unified communications solution not only offers reduction in travel time, but also better sales closure and, subsequently, increased revenue generation.

Even though it is not a new technologysince unified communications has been around for a couple of yearsthe integrated unified platform is emerging as the need of the hour. The fact that the individual components of unified communications are already witnessing healthy double digit growth numbers is encouraging too. For instance, emailing and IP telephony is growing at 20 percent and 30 percent CAGR respectively.

Interestingly, solution providers claim that there is an increasing interest by CIOs, who are brainstorming unified communications pros and cons. They claim that this strong interest among enterprises to understand there has been a how the technology can help them impact the cost optimization efforts as well as prepare for the future.

Vivek Porwal, business unit head, Unified Communications, Avaya GlobalConnect says, Demand for pilots has been coming from all major enterprise accounts. Service providers too have been actively demanding solutions for enhancing their offering to their enterprise clients as well as for individual users.

Even though the market adoption of unified communications has been slow so far, according to IDC, the UC market is expected to expand annually at a rate of 25 percent to reach $1,320 mn by 2011.

UC and the Recession

The arrival of unified communications signals the beginning of the convergence of VoIP telephony, email, instant messaging, mobile communications, and audio and video web-conferencing into a single platform that shares a common directory and common developer tools. The other pieces of the unified communications portfolio include the conferencing and collaboration tools and unified messaging tools.

Interestingly, Microsoft saves $5 mn each year with unified messaging through reduced hardware and maintenance costs. Among its clients, Mehra points out, while Raymond saved over $0.45 mn, which is 86 percent saving on travel and marketing bill with Microsoft Live Meeting, Macawber Beekay saved close to 10-15 percent travel costs Lakshmi Vilas Bank, which is a nationalized bank based in Tamil Nadu was able to realize 40 percent savings on telephone charges with the Unified communications solution.