Unified Communications: Risks and Rewards A CIO Round table discussion

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

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When in Goa work is the last thing on your mind. You simply want to unwind leaving all your worries behind and instead drown yourself in enchanting ambience that the place has in plenty. But how about mixing fun and business? This is precisely what we set foot to do in Goa when we conducted a CIO round table discussion on the benefits of adopting Unified Communications during the first week of September, 4th and 5.th It was pouring heavens that time of the year, a typically Konkani weather, and we were forced inside the drier confines of Taj Vivanta at Panaji for most of the time. But rather than divulging what all we did during our stay, let's move straight to the 5th morning when the CIO round table started.

UC strategies
PCQuest began the proceedings by presenting the results of a recent survey conducted to find the key issues organizations face in communications and the various technologies they plan to deploy in future. The respondents' profile varied from a good number (30%) of manufacturing companies to an equally impressive IT/ITES (25%), Banking and Finance, Pharma and a fair sprinkling of the remaining industry segments. The annual turnover of these ranged from more than Rs 5,000 crores (16% organizations) at the top end to Rs 100 crores (25%) at the lower end. A key finding here was that almost all organizations face travel budget cuts as a result of the economic slowdown and hence are looking at alternative means to communicate. But surprisingly, not all plan to increase their communications budget. Here the survey points to an equal mix amongst those who shall increase, decrease or retain it in the same shape. And even though the satisfaction levels with the current communications equipment were high, there were issues common to all: the difficulty to organize meetings (video or audio) globally across branches and with customers; the difficulty in managing multiple channels of communications, not knowing what channel to use to reach the right person at the right time; and the ever rising costs in managing such multiple channels. The next issue we put to vote was the technologies already deployed to communicate amongst enterprises. Note that here we're excluding voice calls and SMS, being the primary means for communications. The majority of respondents have deployed IMs as the response figure of 66% would suggest. Very close were mobile devices (such as smartphones), VoIP, audio conferencing, standard definition video conferencing, etc. However, still low on deployment were Presence, HD video conferencing and UC at 4, 18 and 15% respectively.
But the moment you turn around the question and ask what technologies they plan to deploy in future, the response turns on its head. UC and VoIP top the list at 37 and 33% respectively. So, clearly UC seems to be the logical way ahead for enterprises to integrate multiple channels of communications and to provide an effective communications alternative to substitute for reduced travel.

Most delegates gave instances of how they use SMS channel to communicate effectively with their employees, customers, partners, etc. For example, employees are SMSed about their salary being credited to their accounts, suppliers are kept aware about the status of various raw materials, customers about the delivery status of their orders, and so on.

Converged communications for future
A key suggestion made during discussions was that CIOs should look at the technology investments being made, whether they are business relevant or not. If they are able to justify the RoI, the technology would deployment would automatically be accelerated. Another issue was whether legacy systems would be able to take the load of new applications. What would be the cost involved in adding multiple apps to PBX, for instance? Moreover, will the legacy systems even support the new-age business objectives? The switch to UC is not going to be a one step process as it entails invoking a common platform, integration of different apps, training end users, bringing about cultural changes, but above all, taking a buy-in from all stakeholders concerned-management, customers, vendors, banks, all need to be connected to a common platform.

Adeesh Sharma, PCQuest presents the results of 'UC Strategies' survey, conducted by PCQuest.	Ashwani Tikoo, GM-Service Delivery, CSC on 'Deploying UC in an Enterprise.”	Nagi K, GM, Datacraft on 'Future proofing your Converged Communication Strategy

According to Gartner, UC is already a mature technology and is not just a hype. However, as an organization you need to look into the business benefits of investing in UC. The way you budget for your IT infrastructure is changing. As your needs evolve you need to make modifications to stay ahead of competition. More than the hardware or software you purchase for your communications setup, you're buying capabilities to let your business grow. It is no more a case of buying a switch or a router. UC is being seen as a technology that provides competitive advantage. You should not wait for it to evolve but be a pioneer for others to emulate. Whatever you need for business communications should be clearly defined in your roadmap. The focus should be more on the strategic and operational aspects of your organization.

Boundaryless collaboration
The latest technology trends that are bound to redefine collaboration include: Mobility as the top priority; video conferencing; social networking; virtualization; and SaaS and hosted solutions. Already you can see audio/video and data collaboration happening in various forms and the concept of hosted data centers. There are a lot of UC services that are likely to come on the hosted platform in future. The secret behind the success of these technologies however is going to be how they are accepted by end users. For instance, shall people avoid travel out of will or would it be forcefully embargoed. There are certain business imperatives that come along with a UC solution. These include: cost reduction; increase in employee productivity; customer intimacy; competitive differentiation and innovation. But to achieve the full benefits of a UC solution you need to have three important pillars in place and working: Culture-people should feel the need to adopt to the new technology; Process-an organization's processes have to be modified to get maximum business returns; and of course Technology-having the best-of-breed solutions in place. The way people work is fast changing. People work from different places, home and on the move. Any good collaboration solution should be flexible enough in adjusting to this new paradigm. And to have a seamless collaboration solution you should start in steps. First begin by having intra-company collaboration. Next scale it to include inter-company collaboration in 1-2 years time and gradually in 3+ years aim for a completely boundaryless collaboration. Taking a quick example, consider a scenario where you have hosted solutions from Salesforce.com and WebEx. How about extending a phone conversation to a WebEx session?

The moot point is whenever you build the architectural framework with the end state in mind, location and mobility of employees have to be an integral part of it.

Unification using PBX convergence
We've discussed the different silos of communication channels like voice, IM, email, and audio, video and web conferencing. We've also seen how business communication needs are changing and the need for anytime, anywhere connectivity. An interesting case is that of organizations that have converged PSTN calls with VoIP through logical partitioning of their IT infrastructure. Such organizations need not have multiple phones on desks but the same phone can be used to access both types of calls. This ensures mobility for employees within a closed-user group (CUG) as they can move from branch to branch virtually carrying their extensions around. These extensions are nothing but unique IDs assigned to each employee within a CUG who can use them to login to any phone, across locations. Thus, each employee has a permanent extension that can be roamed around with. A related concept is that of desktop virtualization. Employees can move to any workplace as per business needs and login to get their own desktop.

The setup to demonstrate Unified Communications in an enterprise. Shown above are Cisco VoIP phones and call manager.	Anil Chopra, PCQuest (center) moderated a panel discussion on the risks and rewards in deploying UC.

A typical UC scenario
A large enterprise typically has a head office and several branch offices. All employees have a PSTN phone, a mobile phone and even a VoIP phone. How do you ensure that you reach out to a particular employee seamlessly, cutting across these multiple channels? A UC solution can be deployed to ensure single number reach to that employee. Calls originating from either of these channels could be configured to terminate on the PSTN, VoIP or mobile phone of the recipient. For instance, a call originating from a PSTN number could be configured to be forwarded to the mobile number of the employee after a specified number of rings on the PSTN extension. You can always configure the equipment to indicate which calls you would like forwarded to your mobile phone while not on desk and the ones that you would want to ignore. May we add here, that Indian laws do not permit an interconnection between PSTN and IP networks, so you can't have a PSTN call terminating on a VoIP phone and vice-versa.

But you can devise an intelligent work around through the use of logical partitioning as discussed in the previous section. In case the call originates from a VoIP network and you're not on your desk to receive it on a VoIP phone, the call manager can be configured to transfer it to the PSTN network. So, to the recipient on mobile, the call would appear to be the one coming from the PSTN network of his office. You can also extend your smartphone to double up as a WiFi-based VoIP phone by registering it with your call manager. Such arrangement works with smartphones on all popular platforms: Symbian, Windows Mobile, Blacberry, etc and is good for people always on the move.

Have a query on UC?

Please visit forums.pcquest.com and go to the Unified Communications channel. You can download all presentations from this event and also post your queries on UC.

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