Increased bandwidth allows for vast communication opportunities

Although South Africa still needs to catch up to worldwide unified communications (UC) adoption, the impending bandwidth boom will create a variety of opportunities for enhanced communication.

“As with most technologies, we are lagging behind, but UC is not particularly mature all over the world,” says Andy Bull, MD for Mitel SA.

Dave Paulding, Interactive Intelligence's regional sales director for UK, Middle East and Africa, agrees. “UC is an emerging technology,” he says. “Although Gartner's hype cycle places it beyond the infancy stage, it is not in mass use on a global scale.”

Although he believes adoption rates are set to increase as the industry evolves, he cautions companies not to be taken in by the UC hype and to be wary of multiple definitions for the concept. “UC is one of those terms that marketers will 'hype' and adapt for their own benefit. The concept of UC is not spectacularly new at all,” he says.

According to Hannes Lategan, solution strategist of CA Southern Africa, local connections are costly and still slow, by global standards. “This is, however, changing and users are increasingly becoming comfortable with UC services.” Home use of public communications channels and social networking services are both drivers for user familiarity and UC adoption, he says.

Rudie Raath, network consulting group manager at HP Technology Solutions, also cites user demands and expectations as primary drivers of the technology. “Users are requesting when and where they want to meet with colleagues and what kind of collaboration they require. Customers are also driving adoption through requesting on-demand support from their service suppliers,” he says.

Another significant driver to widespread UC adoption is the many benefits it brings to today's progressive workforce. According to Bull, UC allows for faster decision-making, which ultimately has a positive impact on the bottom line. “Better communication greatly improves productivity and efficiency, too.”

According to Chris Pretorius, senior Cisco product manager: unified network services division at Business Connexion, “Customers are looking to UC solutions to improve collaboration, efficiency and productivity while simultaneously saving on business running costs such as time and money spent of travel and face-to-face meetings.”

“UC is all about communicating with the right person at the right time,” says Raath. “It provides more opportunities for collaboration and dissolves geographical boundaries and physical restrictions.”

UC allows for a more flexible workforce, agrees Paulding. “A dispersed workforce, such as travelling and home-based workers, can be made possible through UC,” he says. “Increased flexibility, more productivity, and cost-savings are just a few of the benefits of a mobile workforce. On average, mobile workers are happier - they are more productive, more satisfied and produce better quality of work overall.”

Despite a plethora of benefits, there remain many barriers to adoption and market maturity.

Richard Smuts-Steyn, CEO of Multisource, emphasises the serious need for interoperability. “We need middleware that will bring all the incongruent systems together. The networks and service providers need to find a common ground.” According to Louis Helmbold, business development manager at Axiz, successful UC implementations will require that products from multiple vendors are used. “Acceptance of this will show market maturity,” he says.

“If the providers really want to serve consumers better and reach market maturity, they will allow communications to terminate at their competition,” says Smuts-Steyn.

As bandwidth increases, he says, we can also hopefully expect TDM-based communication infrastructures to be replaced by IP-based ones. “IP-termination is only now being tested locally,” he says. As enhanced data quality and increased communication channels begin resulting from improved broadband, archiving and storing content could put a strain on storage. “UC content will place a growing burden on storage, making IT management software essential. Video content needs plenty of storage space,” says Lategan

According to Helmbold, data center consolidation will play an important role as UC has high storage demands

Although Pretorius agrees that UC will increase network traffic, he believes it will only have a small impact on storage needs.

Due to this increase in storage demands according to Lategan, there is a growing trend to outsource storage to a data centre or into the cloud. “But it needs to be well managed to be secure, reliable and useful for the company,” he cautions. As Internet traffic becomes less and less of an issue, UC has the potential to open up a world of possibilities, according to Raath. “Distance learning, for one, will become more accessible and mainstream, and will accelerate skills development,” he says. “It was also enable smaller universities to compete with larger ones.”

However, before making use of any new technology, proper planning is necessary, Raath cautions. “Every year, companies waste billions of dollars by spending money on incorrect technology because they failed to plan correctly.

Once implemented, it is also important that UC be adequately managed and controlled. “UC is being rapidly and widely adopted, but it has to be managed with software capable of providing dynamic business service management to deliver full value. Then it can support collaboration, productivity and the business processes that depend on good communications,” advises Lategan.

Ultimately, all the benefits of UC are centred on spending more time on innovation and growing the core business, Raath concludes.

* Voice plays an important role in UC considerations and is seen as one of the killer applications; other killer applications include presence, mobility and unified messaging.
* In 2008 Frost & Sullivan forecasted that by 20141 the installed base telephony-centric UC clients will reach 50 million. Microsoft further noted its anticipation that the user groups would be made up of:
* 50% headset users
* 25% handset/speakerphones
* 25% utilising PC build in devices
* In response to this, Jabra anticipates that 10% of the above mentioned 50% will be mobile Bluetooth headset users, which means doubling the current market size.
* Additionally, furious developments in and market outputs of mobile technology are expected to play a key role in reviving the uptake of Mobile VOIP. Take the smartphone, for instance, these sophisticated tools can facilitate faster and more convenient communications as they boast the necessary technology to be integrated into some of today's most intricate UC platforms.
* As smartphones become more pervasive, previous misconceptions of mobile VOIP will be dispelled and this will undoubtedly become a new driving force for the uptake of UC. In fact, research by World Wide Worx2 noted that over the past two years, three-quarters of large South African companies have deployed smartphones and integrated these devices into the business processes within their organisations.
* The top vertical markets for the uptake of UC are expected to be financial services, communications, healthcare, and retail.
* The major geographies in 2014 are expected to be EMEA, APAC and North America.
Sources:
1 Frost & Sullivan, 2008
2 Smartphones made big entry into corporate South Africa - study (http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/smartphones-made-big-entry-into-corporate-south-africa-study-2010-02-26)

By HolgerReisinger, sales director in CC&O (Call centre and Office) for Jabra in EMEA Markets

A few notable initiatives have recently been launched to help accelerate and facilitate UC maturity.

One City, One Number: In a drive to improve its quality of service to the public, the City of Johannesburg is implementing a unified contact centre to deal with all municipal enquiries and complaints. Customers will be able to either e-mail or fax queries/complaints and will be kept up-to-date with the progress of the resolution via SMS. This contact centre forms part of a new internal system that aims to provide the customer with a single entry point into the city, with one customer database on a common IT platform. There are currently 1.2 million registered customers whose details are being captured and consolidated into a unified system that will enable residents to receive a single bill from the City of Johannesburg.

The UCIF: Polycom, along with HP, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, and Logitech/LifeSize, is co-founding the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF), a non-profit alliance of worldwide technology leaders working together to deliver open UC solutions. The UCIF provides customers with standards-based, cross-vendor interoperability of UC hardware and software solutions that span enterprises and the service provider cloud to enable organisations and consumers to seamlessly communicate and collaborate. The UCIF will utilise existing industry standards and define new standards to eliminate the gaps between current protocols and broad-based interoperability. UCIF membership is open to hardware and software solution providers, service providers and network operators