UC and collaboration across enterprises

BANGALORE, INDIA: Video collaboration is rapidly gaining momentum, with more and more organisations today adopting such collaboration tools not just to have executive - and senior management connect with each other, but increasingly to aid collaboration between business functions such as sales, engineering and even HR teams. In a dynamic market, widely dispersed or on-the-go employees need to connect and collaborate not just among themselves but increasingly with their stakeholders - customers, factory workers, potential employees.

Video collaboration is therefore no longer just a ‘communication' tool; it is as much linked to enhancing business productivity, as a go-to-market tool used to enhance the overall collaboration experience.

Video collaboration solutions are an integral component of enterprise communications. Businesses today typically use multiple communications platforms and/or tools to further enhance their collaboration capabilities including instant messaging (chat),  telephony (including IP telephony), video conferencing, data sharing (including web connected electronic whiteboards), along with non-real-time communication services such as unified messaging (integrated voicemail, e-mail, SMS and fax) to communicate with internal and external stakeholders.

This is what is called unified communications (UC). Unified communications is not necessarily a single product, but a set of products and solutions that provide a consistent and unified user experience across multiple devices and media types. Put simply, this allows an employee to send a message on one medium and receive the same communication on another medium. So for example, a salesman can receive a voicemail message from his customer and be able to access it through e-mail or a cell phone while on the move. Alternately, imagine a few employees on the move, using smartphones or tablets.

Imagine some of them with contacts from Skype, Facebook, Google Talk and other applications. Now imagine having the power to conference in any of these contacts using any of these applications and allowing them to have access to the same video collaboration platform as the other participants - all through a browser window. That's not just interoperability but "extended interoperability" to video-collaboration services, allowing for the same security and reliability as enterprise systems. It is about eliminating the islands of proprietary technologies which prevent systems from seamlessly working together. It is about enabling organisations to collaborate not just in an internal homogenous ecosystem that is very much in the CIO's control but also in an external, heterogeneous ecosystem, with external partners, customers and other stakeholders.

In today's mixed UC environments, the only practical way to truly unify communications is to orchestrate the broadest possible use of open standards and native interoperability to enable all the disparate parts involved to work together seamlessly. This eliminates inefficiencies in communications to make organisations more productive and responsive; giving businesses the flexibility to connect and collaborate, easily, reliably and securely, regardless of network, carrier, protocol, application or the device they want to use.

A preferred vendor therefore should deliver not just an extensive array of end-to-end collaboration solutions but also the most advanced and extensive UC interoperability to enable customers to leverage legacy investments and unlock the full power of the video collaboration environment. It offers IT administrators a unified and extensible path for customers to fully video-enable their organisations and, more importantly, help prevent single-vendor lock-in.

Benefits

The combination of delivering best-in-class products and leveraging a rich user experience by vendors along with interoperability provides new possibilities in different sectors like government, healthcare manufacturing, and education. This helps in driving video ubiquity and wider user adoption and offers greater chances for companies to win customers.

As more and more businesses use video to collaborate and meet face-to-face from any location for more productive and effective engagement with colleagues, partners and customers, the use of highly flexible open-standards video enables the best possible video collaboration experience across many networks. This helps enterprise minimise the investment required to efficiently distribute video across networks and devices. An interoperable network also allows companies to choose the right mix of solutions and products from multiple vendors to best suit the UC ecosystem that they require and one that's in synch with their budgets.

Interoperability will help to drive video growth in the future, unlocking greater value, flexibility and investment protection for multi-vendor deployments. These innovations take video everywhere irrespective of the platform or network. This also enables service providers to deploy open cloud-based unified communication and collaboration services, giving customers the capability to communicate outside their organisations and across their supply chain to suppliers, partners and customers.

The author is managing director, India & SAARC at Polycom.