Tomorrow’s communications landscape

Lavanya Palani Batcha of Frost & Sullivan paints a picture of the future of unified communications technology.

“Although the services-based model is suitable for all manner of enterprises, the most significant market could potentially be SMEs”
-Lavanya Palani Batcha

The unified communications landscape is dynamic and continuously developing. Market participants such as vendors endeavor to grow their product and service offerings, depending on the current or anticipated state of the market. Pure hardware vendors are now looking to diversify into adding software-based products into their portfolio, thereby bringing forth a more comprehensive unified communications solution. It is imperative that the enterprise end user understands, identifies and makes decisions pertaining to trends that could shape the enterprise communications scenario in the future. Elaborated below are three significant developing trends to look out for in the coming years.

Service-Oriented Architecture: Today unified communications is widely understood to encapsulate voice, video, and data applications via a range of devices such as desktop PC, desk phone, mobile device and the like. However, there is an increasing momentum towards enhanced service offerings such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which can bring additional benefits to an enterprise that has already implemented unified communications. solutions based on SOA, facilitated applications such as real-time identification/tracking embedded within the unified communications platform and have promising potential in industry verticals such as hospitality, aviation, and healthcare amongst others. Vendors such as Nortel have been exploring the amalgamation of SOA and unified communications. It is anticipated that as this avenue develops further in the future, there would be myriad enterprise-centric business processes that can be integrated via SOA and unified communications.

Interoperability: The world of Unified Communications involves a plethora of devices, applications, solutions and services, with the majority being built on closed, proprietary architectures that deny any interoperability between OEMs. This presents a challenge, especially in the case of an enterprise with multiple locations possessing proprietary communications products from a host of OEMs at each of these sites. The networking and unification of these divergent products in order to streamline communications within the enterprise can be a daunting and cumbersome task, not to mention the existing hindrance of proprietary products and solutions. Adding to the complexity, if the said enterprise were to look at adopting unified communications, they would be left with no further option other than to undertake a complete forklift operation. This would essentially involve discarding all legacy proprietary products thereby sinking significant initial capital investment on the equipment. Therefore, as greater numbers of enterprises display interest in the unified communications solution, the need for fundamental interoperability between products from different vendors is of the essence. Given the current prominence of collaborative environments in the unified communications arena, interoperability becomes especially relevant. Such a scenario has prompted several alliances and partnerships amongst unified communications market participants, even amongst traditional rivals. Vendors such as Microsoft and IBM have been major unified communications competitors; however, there have been announcements regarding these vendors working towards interoperability of their unified communications solutions. One significant and positive development towards achieving interoperability is the growing importance of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as a widely accepted standard for multimedia communications. This can help towards a semblance of interoperability, if devices and solutions are built based on the SIP standard. However, the industry is witnessing differences in terms of SIP implementation by vendors. This could pose even more problems with several third party solutions being available. To counter such a problem, vendors would need to develop highly specific interoperability solutions.

Hosted and managed unified communications services: The hosted and managed services model has been slowly gaining traction. Enterprises have started to lay more emphasis vis-à-vis focusing on their core competencies and leaving the routine business processes to be handled by skilled third-party service providers. Services based models also serve to reduce the capital expenditure required on hardware and equipment. Unified communications is no exception. Vendors and system integrators are looking at various business models that would enable them to deploy hosted or managed UC services such as IP telephony, conferencing and collaboration and so on. The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model for unified communications has been quietly emerging into the forefront. Although the services-based model is suitable for all manner of enterprises, the most significant market could potentially be Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Besides the cost savings involved, the SME customer can look forward to experiencing at least a partial implementation of unified communications within the enterprise. The infrastructure required for on-premise unified communications would entail having a sizeable number of skilled support and maintenance staff, which may not be feasible, especially for an SME. In the case of a service-based model, the service provider saves the enterprise from the hassle of support and maintenance. An example of the SaaS based model is that of the Cisco WebEx Connect platform that provides the capabilities for audio and video conferencing, presence integration and messaging. With additional support for document and task management, this platform serves as a collaborative unified communications tool.

In conclusion: Despite setbacks about the adoption of Unified Communications due to recent economic trends, the future looks promising with significant potential for this market to grow steadily.

These key technological trends have the power to shape the market landscape and further augment it, by simplifying existing solutions and ensuring that the needs of enterprise end users are served.

Lavanya Palani Batcha is Senior Research Analyst- Information and Communication Technology Practice- South Asia and Middle East at Frost & Sullivan. For feedback or  enquiries contact tanu.chopra@frost.com.