The Hindu Business Line : Towards one point

Until now, it has all been about making a business case. However, over the next year, the focus will move to more concrete and tangible deployment issues. To succeed, it is critical that business leaders, IT managers and planners understand where UC solutions offer value and how they improve competitiveness.

Unified communications is designed to eliminate the barriers that have traditionally separated voice calls, e-mail, instant messaging and conferencing in all forms. Once all these communication media are carried over a common Internet protocol (IP) network, it is possible to manage them all from a single point and use them with common devices, enabling companies to transform key business processes with improved communication flows.

UC products are used by employees for their own communication as well by organisations to support workgroup and collaborative communication. These products also extend unified communications outside the boundaries of a company to enhance communications between organisations, as well as to support interaction among both very large public audiences and specific individuals.

Not a Single Product, System or Solution

In addition to integrating existing communication channels, unified communications offers a method to integrate communication functions directly with business applications. Gartner calls this capability communications-enabled business processes (CEBPs). By 2012, 80 per cent of leading organisations will have adopted some form of CEBPs for competitive improvement.

The largest single value in unified communications lies in its ability to reduce human latency within a company’s process and improve a business’s ability to respond and to be agile.

For instance, if communications-enabled business processes enable an engineer to fix a fault on a production line 30 minutes sooner, the benefit is not just a saving of the engineer’s time. Rather its significant value is in restarting the production line sooner, which is likely to prevent a delay amounting to thousands of dollars per hour.

3 functional areas

Gartner divides unified communications into three functional areas:

Personal UC is geared towards the individual and includes smartphones, PDAs and desktop communicators. These provide access to voice, IM, presence information and business applications. Presence provides information about the availability and status of individuals or shared resources. This form of UC is geared towards supporting individual or personal productivity.

For instance, rich presence (which shows the availability of individuals across multiple channels, such as IM, phone, mobile phone and video) enables individuals to be more productive because it simplifies their work tasks. In addition, when applied in other ways, it can support collaboration work and enterprise-wide objectives.

Workgroup unified communications is oriented towards supporting collaborative and team efforts. Examples of ways to improve performance include the use of presence to speed identification of the individual with the right skills, the use of business rules to route communications, or the use of virtual meeting rooms to speed rapid-response teams.

Enterprise UC integrates communications with enterprise-wide and department-level applications, business processes and workflows. An example of this can be found in a credit-card authorisation. When a bank receives a request for a credit-card authorisation, an application reviews the request in real time. If the transaction is outside the credit-card holder’s usual behaviour, then it is flagged as being at high risk of fraud. The system makes an outbound notification to the credit-card holder (phone, e-mail, short message service).

If the system succeeds in reaching the card holder, then the individual is requested to confirm his or her identity. As a result, instead of rejecting a transaction from a valued customer, the bank can allow the transaction, improving the service and reducing its and the client’s fraud exposure.

Investments in a communication infrastructure often result in benefits to multiple areas and individuals. For instance, making presence information available for group productivity reasons can also offer benefits at the personal individual, workgroup and enterprise levels.

Evolving scene

Current unified communications product functionality includes IP-private branch exchange (PBX), voice over IP (VoIP), presence, e-mail, audio and Web conferencing, videoconferencing, voice mail, unified messaging and instant messaging (IM).

These are all evolving rapidly, towards integration, but each is also developing in its own way. For instance, IP-PBXs are replacing PBXs and, in turn, are being displaced by more open IP-telephony models.

Unified messaging will bring voice mail and e-mail together; while separate voice, video and Web conferencing capabilities will converge and instant messaging’s presence capabilities will expand to all live channels, including voice, conferencing, video and e-mail.

Vendors will espouse their solutions as the best, but not all architectures will be optimum, nor will they all survive. Solutions from vendors such as IBM and Microsoft will focus on how to expand from their e-mail and web-conferencing base to encompass the broader unified communications portfolio, while solutions from Avaya, Siemens, Cisco, Alcatel and Nortel will use the voice products as the foundation to their UC offering.

Because no single vendor has all of the elements needed for a complete solution, new partnerships are also redefining the market. Examples include Microsoft and Nortel, which have created a relationship called the Innovative Communications Alliance to help partner on unified communications products and solutions, and IBM’s relationship with Cisco. All these companies are competing against each other in one or more UC product categories, but also work together to provide complete portfolios to their clients.

The unified communications market will consolidate, and some of the partnerships announced will turn into battles, while others will evolve into tightly unified solutions.

The complexity of UC and lack of industry experience means that organisations will have to plan carefully to avoid failures and meet expectations.

Best practices will be critical to success. They include: focusing on a sub-set of UC functionality initially, ensuring that key stakeholders are involved in the planning, providing plenty of end-user training, conducting extended pilot periods, measuring success and failure of initial trials, and finally learning from early experiences and pilots.

The author is research vice-president, Gartner.