On current scenario

Unified communication (UC) in the Indian market is at an early growth stage but has tremendous potential to transform the enterprise communications landscape.

The primary driver for unified communication is majorly from the adoption and migration to the IP telephony platform. Although several enterprises are implementing only specific applications to meet their current need, it is anticipated that these enterprises would mature in their outlook and seek to further augment their UC experience in future. Unified messaging, conferencing and collaboration, presence, and mobility are anticipated to be key growth engines in the future.

On growth drivers

Over the last several years, the majority of IT organizations have deployed Voice over IP (VoIP) wherein cost savings drove most of the early deployments of VoIP.

Things are changing now, while cost savings are still an important driver of VoIP deployment, there are other business drivers that are equally important to companies as they extend their initial VoIP deployments.

Ability to enhance business processes, improve employee productivity, and enable mobility are the drivers in the current scenario. Green initiatives with respect to reducing carbon footprint are also driving enterprises to adopt collaboration in a much broader way.

On market and technology trends

The UC market is a big opportunity as many organizations are looking for ways to come out of the communication silos like workers have many communication devices such as wired and wireless telephones, PCs, PDA, RIM devices, pagers, and several types of messaging systems. Each mode of communication requires a separate address to contact one another and calls for separate management, administration, and directories. Communication silos increase the complexity of managing business communications. Despite the increase in number of voice and data communication devices, workers still lack the ability to effectively reach others for time-critical events as needed. Not communicating effectively lowers worker productivity and potentially results in business loss due to delays in meeting business targets.

The key technologies which are getting acceptance in the recent past are the following:

• Presence
• Mobility
• Rich media conferencing/collaboration solutions to enable virtual workspaces to the demanding business needs and unified messaging.

On key demand verticals

Although UC is intended to benefit all verticals we are seeing larger acceptance IT/ITeS, BFSI, Manufacturing, and healthcare verticals:

On key challenges

Telecom-related regulations are one of the common challenges faced by all players.

On major policies or regulatory issues affecting growth

In the context of Indian market, one of the key issues is in the area of logical partitioning which restricts enterprises wherein customers are unable to enjoy the full benefits of some key UC applications like mobility and conferencing.

On future outlook

UC has a very promising future in the Indian market as acceptance is getting better day by day across all verticals.

The most important aspect of unified communication is that businesses now have many more options for how they connect with their employees, partners and customers. Unified communication offers a host of collaboration tools that will help a business to be more productive and efficient. The return on investment is clear for unified communication.

On green initiatives

Collaboration related to telepresence is large adoption by Wipro as part of our green initiative. Currently we have a few locations connected globally; however, as we move ahead we would be increasing our footprint on telepresence with number of locations both in India and outside India.