UC revolutionizing business landscape

“Unified Communications (UC) is revolutionising the business landscape. In response to the current economic forces, companies are already taking a ‘revolutionary’ approach to advancing their businesses in terms of communication.

UC is the amalgamation of different and disparate communication systems that are available to an enterprise user. UC applications help improve the enterprise user’s productivity and enhance collaboration by the integration and convergence of multiple enterprise communication channels.

UC applications are expected to be embedded and integrated into business processes and enterprise applications such as Contact Centers, Supply Chain, etc. The adopters of UC have been across verticals like BFSI, Information Technology, the Government, manufacturing, service providers and educational institutions. There is a huge untapped market for UC in India, despite the CIOs being unable to quantify the benefits or measure productivity gains.

According to Girish Trivedi, Deputy Director, Telecom Practice, Frost and Sullivan, South Asia and Middle East, “Given the current state of the economy, enterprises are placing increasing emphasis on optimizing costs;

Unified Communications could be one of the means to significantly reduce long-term costs on travel, achieve faster turn-around in terms of ROI as well as improve overall productivity and efficiency in the workplace. UC has for long been exclusively driven by large enterprises. However, this trend is slowly, yet surely, changing, as several vendors look to cater to the largely untapped SMB segment by formulating innovative models like hosted UC service. Key UC applications such as IP telephony, e-mail, conferencing etc, are being packaged as a hosted service with attractive pricing, in order to lure the SMBs.”