Feature

Mobile UC: the next big thing

Mobility in the Indian UC marketplace is yet to be adopted on a large scale, but enterprises have started realizing its potential benefits, writes Nivedan Prakash

The growth of mobile phone shipments in the Indian market has resulted in the fast adoption of mobility in the unified communications (UC) space. The last few years have seen a tremendous growth in mobile UC. The choices users have today clearly suggest that mobile UC applications are consistently delivering capabilities that improve the productivity and security of mobile users.

Today, customers are in-charge of their needs, they need standards and interoperability, and the trend is towards single identity and presence to integrate with business applications around business processes. Enterprises are moving towards mobile UC from traditional voice, mail and IM/presence solutions. OEMs are customizing their application/products to port them on to mobile devices as per the vertical or industry demand, instead of a horizontal UC solution.

“The current trend is driven by the arrival of smartphones. Phones like the iPhone, and those that are yet to arrive (in India)—Motorola’s Droid, Palm Pre, and a host of other phones—are getting more and more capable of doing a host of things that were, till now, only possible on the PC. These phones truly allow a person to have one “unified” device for e-mail, voice, browsing, collaboration, etc,” opined Kiran Nataraj, Senior Domain Expert-Telecom Business Unit, Persistent Systems.

Additionally, cell phone makers today offer a range of applications on smartphones. The trend of allowing external developers to build third-party applications is expanding the potential of mobile devices as business tools.

Giving her point of view, Lavanya Palani Batcha, Senior Research Analyst-ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan, said that mobility is one of the most promising applications in the UC domain. It essentially enables the delivery of the corporate desktop in addition to voice communications, through mobile devices. It brings with it advantages in terms of remote accessibility, enhanced productivity, and overall efficiency of the mobile workforce.

Factors pushing the cause

As far as mobile UC is concerned, the Indian market is still in a nascent stage. The key factor in the uptake of mobile UC would be the availability of smartphones that bring with them bigger screens, better usability and development communities that allow various applications to be built. Another aspect is the deployment of 3G/4G networks. However, the current wireless network infrastructure with EDGE speeds is inadequate to do anything except for some e-mail and IM.

Ralph Ede, MD-South Asia, GN Netcom, asserted, “Two factors are driving demand. The first is the desire of companies to reduce operating expenditure. When GN itself rolled out OCS internally, it reduced its monthly telecom costs by more than 30%. The second factor driving demand is improved productivity. Workers who adopt UC are better able to multi-task and through tools like presence management are more quickly able to identify and locate the appropriate resource to solve a business problem.”

Some of the other factors driving the demand of mobile UC in the Indian market include reduced communication cost like phone tariff, improved employee productivity by access to and sharing of information from anywhere, relaxations in TRAI and DOT guidelines and regulations like logical partitioning and introduction of 2G and 3G communication, high availability of bandwidth with reduced costs and availability of cost-effective VoIP solutions, healthy competition among a large number of service providers yielding competitive pricing and flexibility, availability of economical and skilled resources for UC, and the need to improve the end-customer experience.

“The increased adoption of UC is the key driver, though converged communication is becoming a critical component for businesses due to the increased use of smartphones and communication embedded business processes. Presence-based applications are rapidly penetrating into the business world with the expectation to keep the mobile workforce connected with the enterprise 24x7. In general, the power of dual-mode handsets, provide the technology that enables seamless roaming between wireless and cellular networks,” added Shiv Kumar, EVP-Business Development, Zylog Systems.

Vendors & service providers’ strategies Depending on the maturity of the market, vendors are either in communications, demonstration or facilitation mode.

“The main strategy observed is unifying applications on a mobile handset to achieve the benefits that UC has the potential to provide. Dual-mode mobile smart phones are built to work on both Wi-Fi and cellular networks with 3G. Most of the vendors and service providers are customizing and launching their applications and products having portability and integration with a Unified Communications system. Some of the service providers are providing/planning unified communications services as a hosted solution for small customers,” commented Jatinder Singh, Associate Director-Infrastructure Solutions and Technology, CSC India.

Meanwhile, the growth of mobile phone usage and the availability of desktop unified communication solutions have created an opportunity for vendors and service providers to launch products in this area. The most important aspect of UC is that it means different things to different people. So for one type of consumer it would mean one device that will do voice, e-mail, video, and enable online collaboration; and for another set, it would mean a seamless integration between the desktop and the mobile device i.e. starting a task on a computer and finishing it off on the mobile.

“On one side, the mobile industry has grown tremendously and on other side, there have been significant advances in terms of the capabilities of the devices. BlackBerrys and iPhones have become very popular these days. With the increasing capabilities of mobile phones, their usage has also increased, and this includes Mobile UC as well. The advances in smartphones have really been a boon for UC over mobiles. Phone vendors are also adapting the latest features onto mobile phones that are required for UC,” pointed out Vadiraj Aralappanavar, Head Mobile Applications, MindTree.

Apparently, in order to enhance the usage of UC and employee productivity, enterprises are looking to provide access to business applications and information from anywhere using mobile devices like PDAs, phones, etc.

Minhaj Zia, National Sales Manager, Cisco India and SAARC, added, “The growth of mobile phone usage and the availability of desktop unified communication solutions have created an opportunity for vendors and service providers to introduce products that enable mobile users to access many of the features that previously could be accessed only through a PC or fully featured desktop IP telephone. These unified communications services and products enable enterprises to extend telephony features to their mobile users while making them more productive regardless of location.”

Today, we could see instant messaging and collaboration tools on handheld devices like IBM Lotus Notes Sametime and Office Communication Server from Microsoft, which is integrated with Active Directory; voice, Web and video conferencing facilities from the likes of Cisco, Avaya, Nortel, and Siemens; and communication enabled applications products like Agito Networks and DiVitas Networks also have FMC (fixed to mobile convergence).

Business value

Mobile UC allow up-selling to existing customers and at the same time, also help service providers leap ahead of the competition. For the mobile UC user, up-selling requires the immediate availability of information in a seamless fashion even when you are working away from your primary desktop. One of the key benefits of UC is the ability to obtain customer data quickly and efficiently via enterprise business applications.

Mobile UC also allow up-selling to existing customers by enhancing the delivery of multimedia experiences in any workplace, helping people work together more effectively and efficiently, shortening decision times and accelerating innovation.

Service providers can also benefit by providing enterprises with hosted UC. They can leap ahead of the competition by providing creative lease packages or offering enhanced customer care solutions, including but not limited to higher service level guarantees.

Moreover, enterprises can use Mobile UC to significantly increase productivity while lowering their operating costs. Instead of traveling from one location to another, people can conduct their business and transactions from their own location and their companies can witness a significant increase in the productivity. Associated with the productivity benefit, they are getting the cost benefit. Since enterprises would deploy more and more, vendors are going to innovate.

Amit Mehta, Director-UC, Microsoft India, is of the view that mobile UC is definitely a boon for enterprises. It helps in reducing the project completion time, shortens sales cycles, and ensures faster resolution of customer issues. It also enables organizations to collaborate better. Besides, it can bring immediate cost savings to organizations. With the arrival of 3G, you can have video conferencing on your mobile itself, thus avoiding travel expenses.

These capabilities are definitely helping organizations shorten decision cycles, accelerate business, and boost productivity by speeding secure access to information and by making it possible for everyone to collaborate everywhere. Unified communications is a tried-and-true technology trend that creates significant improvement in sales, teamwork, productivity, and efficiency.

nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com