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Unified Communication: need of the hour

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CIOL Bureau
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It a time when organizations are planning or are in the early stages of adoption of IP telephony, videoconferencing, audio-conferencing, and Web-collaboration tools in India, thinking of unified communication (UC) makes an interesting revelation on where technology is taking business communication. How is it impacting business results and how one must plan while making investments to ensure that technology benefits in the near future accrue earlier than they do for competing firms? Just as we are finding communication moving from the traditional TDM networks to IP networks, with UC the communication would be moving from the network to the business applications bringing in a more informed and intelligent communication.

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Why UC?

Let's take a journey into the current communication scenario. Essentially, today an employee is bombarded with communication from multiple communication devices and applications. The challenges of business communication today are that they have a complex nature are disconnected, and expensive. There is an information overload and one finds it difficult to understand what is the best mode of communication to remain effective.

The need of the hour is to simplify and become more efficient to deliver business results. UC is making the communication more intelligent and time efficient. It is simplifying communication and tying-in to business processes. It's essentially targeting to merge real-time and non-real-time communication with a seamless identity and interface across devices. This is where organizations need to delve deeper while making infrastructure investments, and determine if and how these investments in due course, will be able to result into competitive differentiation.

Unified Communication Defined

Unified communications is a key application area under intelligent communication. Industry analyst group Gartner defines UC as the direct result of convergence in communication networks and applications. Different forms of communication have historically been developed, marketed, and sold as individual applications. The convergence of all communications on IP networks and on open software platforms is allowing a new paradigm for Unified Communication.

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UC is essentially "Communications integrated to optimize business processes". The key is that communication, at least in a business enterprise, should be thought of in terms of the business process-task, project, contact or collaboration- to which the communication is related. This takes communication out of the realm of a highly personalized, inconsistent "manual" task and puts it into an informed, predictable, and measurable context.

Routes to Follow

Unified communications can be based on any one of the three routes, which in turn are differentiated by three factors: addressing, identity, and media types.

The telephony-based route uses a telephone number as the addressing and identity route and voice as the primary media type. The IP-telephony suppliers such as Avaya and Alcatel are advancing this model.

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The messaging-based route uses SMTP and IM addresses as the addressing and identity route, and text with attachments as the primary media type. The leading email providers such as Microsoft and IBM are advancing this model.

Finally, the application-based route uses employee identification numbers as the addressing and identity model, with database information in Web portals as the primary media type. Enterprise application software providers such as SAP and Oracle/Siebel are advancing this model.

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Industry analyst group Gartner defines UC

as the direct result of convergence in communication networks and applications

In each case, suppliers work to extend their route to incorporate the other media, initially through expanded user/client interfaces and then by integrating their own and others' capabilities in a "service oriented architecture" (SOA).

Deliverables

Organizations are constantly in search of new ways to transform their businesses, to streamline processes in order to achieve greater productivity and to communicate more efficiently with customers, suppliers, and employees. For this, UC offers a distinct competitive advantage.

UC intends to deliver value in three main categories: customer experience, differentiation of ones business, and controlling resources (time, payroll, assets, expenses, etc). The first two, customers and differentiation, should drive up revenue, while the third should cut costs. Unified Communication help to improve the accuracy of person-to-person communications, accelerate business processes and productivity, and improve an organization's ability to adapt to market changes

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Adopting the UC Paradigm

The way forward is to envisioning the end state where long-term opportunities are headed. Then determine the need in different areas and further select projects with near-term benefits that will help produce quick results.

Is UC deployment something that will involve all employees, or be focused on few critical processes and applications? One may begin by examining both their list of key processes and roster of employee job types. Where the most important processes touch the largest group(s) of employees is exactly where UC should first be implemented. It's important that business process improvement "champion or innovator or teams" use UC for improvising their business processes to derive efficient guidelines. With UC, these teams must target to eliminate massive amounts of wasted time and expense. They should find ways to deliver better products and services faster or less expensively than their competitors. The key is to get these benefits and transform them to get work done. UC can become an integral part of shortening cycle times, building customer satisfaction, and other activities that can be directly connected with hard economic results.

Components of UC

The components of a UC solution include messaging (email, IM, voice, video), calling (audio, video), conferencing (audio, Web, video), presence, device awareness, information sharing (Web chat, file sharing, document sharing), business applications, and database access, tied together with a common user interface (which may be IBM Sametime, Microsoft Office Communicator, or a vendor, say Avaya specific interface).

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Presence is a critical component of UC. Presence will involve a presence server hooked into everything. This means communicating and integrating information from a variety of devices indicating that I'm talking on the phone or cell; my desktop applications notify the server that I'm actively working on a document; and maybe my car tells the server that I'm driving down to my office.

The Path Ahead

Telephony-based solutions are being built on voice over IP (VoIP) PBX networks. Computer telephony integration (CTI) and session initiation protocol (SIP) will be used to connect PBX systems to business processes and communication resources, as has been done in contact centers in the past decade. Resources will include conferencing, voice messaging, instant messaging, speech interfaces, and links to cellular phones. Business processes will include links to customer databases and to users' calendars, contacts, and tasks. Most telephony-based suppliers will offer a software client for PCs, and smart mobile phones will allow access to the user's email account, in order to provide a fully integrated experience.

Messaging-based solutions are being built on email servers and clients, including and expanding the suite of personal and office software tools, such as calendar, contacts, and tasks. Messaging-based solutions will also incorporate IM options integrated into the office tools so that a user's presence status will be informed by calendar events, and thus pointing at a users' directory entry, contact information or IM entry will allow initiation of voice and video communications. These real-time elements will be provided, either by CTI links to the installed PBX systems and related servers, or by adding IP and SIP-based servers to the messaging configurations, utilizing both server-based and peer-to-peer IP communications.

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Application-based solutions are being built on the user interfaces of the applications, including PC clients, Web browsers, mobile wireless devices, and speech interfaces, to deliver the required communication elements to employees at the appropriate point in the process. The applications will deliver the communication functions by integrating to modular, SOA-type services; these services may be bundled into the application package or may be accessed via CTI, SIP or other IT integrations to telephony or messaging servers.

Market Impact

Unlike the VoIP market that is primarily substituting VoIP for TDM telephony without growing the overall market, it is likely that the ability of UC to displace labor and other intermediate costs and expenses will justify an increase in the overall level of spending in the communications industry, for the first time in over two decades.

According to a Gartner Report, 80% of enterprise communications purchase decisions will require support for UC by 2007. By 2008, the Radicati Group estimates that the worldwide UC market will be worth a total of $10.5 bn.

It's important to start evaluating your business operations and determine which key processes can be optimized with unified communications capabilities. You may not care right now, but your competitors certainly do!!!

The author is head of the Unified Communications Business Unit, Avaya GlobalConnect