BANGALORE, INDIA: According to a survey we did of some key CIOs around the country for this issue, Unified Communications was high on their IT purchase list. This is in stark contrast to a survey we did in April this year, wherein a majority of the CIOs said that they had no plans to deploy the same.

At that time, the key hurdle was that UC was still a fairly new concept and difficult to understand. It's interesting to see such a major shift in this trend in just a few months. There can be many reasons for this.

One reason is that all the major networking, communications, and even messaging vendors have entered the UC bandwagon and made a lot of noise around it throughout this year. This has possibly caused enough curiosity amongst IT purchase decision makers to understand the concept and its benefits.

Another could be that there is a larger basket of UC solutions available today, which don't need to be deployed all at once, but in a phased manner. Even we have carried many stories on UC throughout this year, wherein we've highlighted various aspects of this hot trend.

The case for UC
So should you move to UC next year? To answer that, let's first understand the key objective for deploying UC, which is to reach the right person at the right time and by using the right mode of communication. Next you need to determine the extent to which you can achieve this objective, i.e. how much time is being wasted in just trying to reach a person? If it's significant, then that translates to loss of productivity, which eventually translates to financial losses.

The extent of this problem depends upon your organizational setup and the number of modes of communication you use. Organizational setup refers to its geographical spread, whether it has offices in different time zones, etc.

It also refers to the number of mobile users, where all they travel, and what all do they carry with them (laptop, cellphone, data card, etc). The number of communication modes is self-explanatory, and today there are so many of them. There's voice communications through landlines, PBXs, mobiles, voice messengers, IP phones and audio conferencing; text messaging through IMs, mobiles, and email, data sharing through collaboration tools like interactive whiteboards; video conferencing and so on. However, they're all in their own islands and not integrated.

UC provides a way to integrate them so that you know the best way to reach the other party. It saves time as well as money, so it does make sense to consider a move towards it. However, there are a number of issues that must be addressed before that. Two key ones are interoperability and security.

Interoperability amongst UC devices
The entry point into UC for any enterprise begins with a migration to IP telephony, an IP PBX or a voicemail solution. For most organizations, legacy PBXs are reaching end-of-life and most messaging solutions need to be upgraded to some form of unified messaging. However, for migration most companies prefer open standards like SIP and SIMPLE which are gaining popularity over H.323 that was widely used in major IP PBXs. Using open standards ensures interoperability amongst solutions from different vendors. This is especially crucial in cases where enterprises go for best of breed solutions from all the major players.

Cisco's IP telephony, unified messaging, mobility and audio conferencing solutions are more popular while IBM and Microsoft are preferred for email, instant messaging and Web conferencing. And with the number of players in UC space rising constantly, interoperability amongst them is important so that any devices you might add in future integrate properly.

Given this scenario next year would see a major push from enterprises to the large vendors for a possible federation amongst them to ensure that various vendor platforms work seamlessly together to foster greater acceptability for UC solutions.

Security issues
Since VoIP is an integral part of a UC setup, you must first understand where you stand as far as your VoIP implementation goes. Have you already moved to VoIP, or are you planning to? Whichever the case, one of the key things to worry about these days is VoIP security.

The number of VoIP vulnerabilities is growing by leaps and bounds, and need to be understood before you venture into UC. For instance, there are vulnerabilities that could disable your IP phones and freely available tools are available to eavesdrop on VoIP conversations. In the past, we have managed to render an IP PBX useless by attacking it in our lab.

We've even used an ordinary packet sniffer to capture an entire VoIP conversation. This was not as big a problem with traditional digital PBXs, but as one moves to IP, the associated bag and baggage of vulnerabilities comes along with it. One good site for checking out VoIP vulnerabilities is www.sipera. com. The site keeps a look out for VoIP vulnerabilities and how to handle them.

On the move UC
The purpose of having a UC solution does not get fulfilled unless all kinds of communication platforms get integrated in a more seamless manner. In this context, your IP PBX should have the ability to provide a virtual handshake between fixed and mobile telecom networks. This is not just limited to forwarding your office calls to mobile phones but you need to also have a 'Presence' mechanism built-in so that the UC application would automatically forward a call or a message to the mobile recipient without requiring him to manually configure his preferred medium of communication at a particular time.

Look at how unified messaging (UM) has enhanced mobility offered by smart phones. You get voicemails delivered on your smart phone, so you don't need to log into your corporate account again and again. Same applies to how we take calls on mobile phones. A UC solution would make this experience more fruitful through the use of Presence technology that identifies an individual as soon as he connects to a network.

The technology is part of 3G wireless networks and is employed across a variety of mobile communication devices such as cell phones, laptops, PDAs, etc. IETF's Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol (IMPP) is meant to establish standards that make the various Presence technologies interoperable for seamless connectivity to the mobile worker.

Communications as a service
Communications-as-a-Service, or CaaS, as the name suggests is a logical extension to the SaaS model with hosted UC solutions on a service provider's network. IP telephony hardware is hosted at the third-party data center and the user is provided access to assets on a monthly rental basis. Analogous to issues in owning expensive software, this model would grow as soon as companies realize the cost and risk associated with owning an in-house communications system.

The market is expected to grow to a total of $251.9 million by the end of the year, according to Gartner and is expected to wallop to $2.3 billion by 2011. However, there's a lack of focus amongst vendors in the packaging and marketing of the service. So, expect some action in this space in the year 2008 as the picture for owning UC solutions becomes clearer. In fact, there is considerable enthusiasm amongst vendors in pushing CaaS because they eye an opportunity to bundle newer features and capabilities within a single solution and avoid commoditization of the UC market.