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Strategies for Unified Communication

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PANKAJ
New Update

The current economic crisis has impacted the travel budgets of most

organizations, among other budget heads of course. While we've received this

response from almost every CIO we've met on various occasions, we decided to

approach a wider base of CIOs to see if similar sentiments existed

everywhere-and the bad news is that they did! We surveyed more than 60 key CIOs

from leading Indian enterprises to find out this and how were they planning to

combat it. More than 60% of them were from mid to large enterprises having a

turnover ranging from 500 to 5000+ crores. More than 80% of them had faced

travel budget cuts. The rest of them were lucky, as they had not faced the

situation yet, and we sure hope others become as lucky as them soon too! But for

now, 23% are facing more than 50% travel budget cuts, 26% have cut it by 30-40%,

and the rest of the math can easily be done; else you can refer to the graphs

for more information. There were also a few who had taken voluntary travel

budget cuts.

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The results we got from our survey are very interesting. For one,

organizations today are finding it difficult to manage multiple modes of

communication. There are integration issues, difficulties in organizing meetings

between multiple locations, reaching the right people at the right time, among

others. Given this situation, there is a strong tendency to consider a move

towards a unified communication environment. Our survey results showed that 37%

of the CIOs were planning to deploy unified communication in the near future.

The second most preferred option being considered for future deployment is VoIP.

Interestingly, the most preferred mode of communication amongst our survey

respondents was video conferencing, and more over, the preferences were broken

between standard definition VC, high definition VC, and TelePresence.

Presented in this story are the survey's results, which would provide

insights into what kind of communication channels are in use across Indian

enterprises, the kinds of issues they face with them, and what options are being

considered for future deployment to tackle those issues.

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State of communications budgets



Needless to say, the cut in travel budgets has put greater pressure on the

IT departments to enhance their organization's communications systems. 80% of

the CIOs completely agreed with this statement when asked. We were expecting

this greater pressure on the IT department to translate into an increase in IT

budgets for communications systems enhancement for everyone. However, to our

surprise, it didn't. 40% of them said that their IT budgets for communications

were likely to remain the same. This didn't of course mean that they wouldn't

spend anything at all on enhancing their communications systems. It meant that

they already had certain budgets allocated for the task, which were unlikely to

increase, even under so much pressure. There were though, another 26% lucky CIOs,

who were likely to increase their budgets for enhancing their communications

systems because of the pressure. And lastly, there were 27% unlucky ones, whose

budgets were likely to decrease.

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But despite all this, there is a positive side of the picture as well-Most

CIOs remain confident of the capabilities of their existing communications

systems. More than 60% of them were completely satisfied or quite satisfied with

their communications systems; while another 25% of them were just satisfied.

This left us with only a few CIOs who were not that satisfied.

These results might appear quite surprising, because on one side there's

greater pressure on the IT departments to enhance the communications systems;

while on the other, CIOs are satisfied with what they already have. Does this

satisfaction mean that CIOs are not facing any issues with their existing

communications systems? Not really.

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Assess your communication modes



The communications world has today given us ample technologies to reach out

to others. This may not seem apparent at first, but if you start counting the

number of modes of communication being used in your organization, you'll be

surprised. At the basic level, there are three ways to communicate with

others-voice, video, or data. Now for each mode, there are different

technologies available. For voice, there's PSTN line, mobile phone, and VoIP.

For data, there's email, chat, fax, calendar sharing, whiteboarding, etc. For

video, there are different types of video conferencing-standard definition,

high-definition, web-based, etc. Even within each of these, there are multiple

choices available, and different solutions available from different vendors or

service providers.

In our survey, we split the various modes of communication into 12 parts (see

graph). We kept the most basic modes of communication, like landline phones,

PBXs, email, fax, etc out of the list because there would hardly be an

organization that doesn't have them. Out of the rest, instant messaging was the

most widely deployed mode of communication, followed by audio conferencing.

Surprisingly, the use of BlackBerries and PDAs is gaining ground amongst Indian

enterprises, with 58% of the CIOs saying that they were already using it.

Interestingly, data/web based conferencing solutions are not as widely used.

Only 37% of the CIOs were actually using them. Considering that every

organization today has Internet access, these should actually be the most

commonly used solutions. The newer communication modes, like Presence,

TelePresence, and Unified Communications are not so widely used. 11% of the CIOs

had already deployed unified communications, and a majority of them were from

large, 1000 Cr+ organizations.

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Identify the key issues



The biggest challenge organizations face with their existing communications

systems is in organizing meetings across multiple locations. Should it be audio,

video, or data based? This task can be quite daunting. Chances are that you

won't have all three modes of communication deployed across all locations. Two

regions might have video conferencing, while a third region can come in over

audio only. Moreover, the fourth region's person could be on the road and only

reachable on the mobile phone. So you have to figure out the preferred mode of

communication for each region before organizing the meeting.

The next biggest challenge that CIOs face with their communications systems

can be considered as a consequence of the first one--too many parallel

communication channels are actually hampering productivity. There are many

reasons for this, and a discussion of all of them is beyond the scope of this

article. But the main point is that so many communication channels can be used

as well as misused. Or, there can be integration issues between them, leading to

loss of productivity. So having multiple communication channels is a necessary

evil.

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The third challenge that CIOs face with their communication system is even

more frustrating--despite having so many communication channels, you just can't

reach the right person at the right time. Although just about every employee

today would have a mobile phone, it's not always reachable. Maybe the battery

has drained off, or the signal is weak, or the person is busy in a meeting, or

something else. To add insult to injury, you're actually paying for so many

different communication channels, and running around trying to manage them. The

last two are also some of the challenges faced by CIOs with their communication

channels.

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So obviously, something needs to be done about it. And many of the CIOs who

responded to this question said that they were looking at an integrated solution

that can use all three channels of communication effectively.

Identify what to deploy in the future



Amongst all communication channels, the highest preference is being given to

Unified Communications. More than 50% of the CIOs who had plans to deploy

Unified Communications were from large 1000 Cr+ organizations, while 26% of the

CIOs were from organizations with an annual turnover of 500-1000 crores. While

the technology is preferred by different types of organizations, the two major

sectors where we received the highest responses were IT/ITES and manufacturing.

Next most popular communications technology is VoIP and interestingly, it's

the small to mid-sized enterprises that are more interested in deploying it in

the near future. 59% of the CIOs who said this were from organizations with

sub-1000 crores turnover, and 27% were from organizations with sub-100 Cr annual

turnover. Even more interesting was the fact that 61% of the organizations who

had already deployed VoIP were also from small to mid-sized organizations, and

even more interestingly, 33% of them were <100 crore companies. So there seems

to be a lot of interest amongst smaller organizations to deploy VoIP. In this

issue's cover story, we've talked about how to implement some interesting VoIP

solutions.

Leveraging UC for increased

productivity

Ernst & Young has used

IP Telephony to boost productivity, connect on-the-move employees and ensure

cost reduction for internal communications.



Rajeev Seoni, CIO of E&Y, speaks to Vishnu Anand, PCQuest:

What challenges did your company face,

which urged you to embrace UC?



Ernst & Young's operations in India are spread across 8 cities, with an

average of 900 employees in each city. What is unique here is the fact that

on an average, only around 15-20% of this workforce is stationed in our

offices. E&Y, being an auditing and consulting company, a large chunk of our

employees work on site in customer's offices. Internal communication across

teams which could be located in different cities and with customers,

required us to have a virtual single office to meet our operational goals

more effectively. We decided to turn to IP Telephony, as part of our idea to

make a Unified Communications deployment. Every employee of E&Y has a unique

4-digit extension code, and he/she has the ability to come in to any of our

offices in India, and 'log in' to any workstation with a unique password.

Till he/she logs off or the session is terminated automatically at the end

of every working day, the employee can be reached by other team members, or

employees across the country. This Closed User Group (CUG) was a unique

requirement.



Did you face any operational or regulatory

issues during the deployment?



On one hand, we created the CUG, and on the other hand, we also needed

the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Telecom regulations in India

demand that CUGs and PSTN cannot exist as part of the same network

infrastructure. E&Y decided to do a logical partitioning of the CUS and PSTN,

while using the same physical infrastructure. In other words, each user will

have a single physical device, connected via a LAN cable that carries Data,

Voice (CUG and PSTN as two separate streams), and power supply for the

device. This in turn required complex and high-efficiency switches, and

intelligent bandwidth managers. The deployment thus took about a year to

complete, with help from our implementation partners, which includes Wipro.

Tell us about the UC experience after the

deployment?



Besides the obvious uses and tremendous business impact, there are a lot

of frills that have come with the deployment. For instance, it allows users

to book their own audio conferences and allocate pass codes for up to 6

members (the system is capable of audio conferencing bridging of up to 60

ports). We are also working on integrating voicemail into the system, and

integrating it with Lotus Notes or Exchange, where we will receive an email

alert and a link to the voicemail. Other plans are to integrate video

capabilities where a user's system can automatically detect if the webcam of

the user he/she is making a call with is active, and begins automatic video

chat. In the long run, we are planning also to incorporate a mechanism by

which we can allocate voice, data and video traffic to separate accounts.

For instance, we can separate a user's personal communication, communication

with a customer or client to separate accounts. The challenge here, of

course is to use bandwidth in the most effective manner. E&Y is planning

also to connect the India offices to global centers in the months to come.

Tell us the business benefits you have

achieved so far.

There has been a definite productivity

increase after the deployment. Professional interactivity has increased and

there has been a definite increase in time management. We are relatively

sure that the audio conferencing capabilities have also led to elimination

of other pricier options. On one hand E&Y is looking to leverage as much as

we can from our deployment, while on the other to ensure that it is linked

to business goals and the larger goals of the company.

Surprisingly, data/web based conferencing is the third choice with 27% of the

CIOs planning to deploy it in the near future. The technology is preferred by

organizations of all sizes, be it sub-1000 Cr or 1000 Cr+.

The technology that seems to be generating the highest interest is Video

Conferencing, and not without good reason. The technology has evolved

considerably over the recent past, and the greatest addition has been the

evolution of High-definition Video Conferencing. Even there, the upper end of

high-end video conferencing is TelePresence. If we combined the votes for

standard definition and high-definition video conferencing, along with the votes

for TelePresence, then this gets the highest preference amongst all other

communications technologies. 55% of the CIOs who participated in our survey were

interested in deploying some form of video conferencing in the future.

The other technologies that were of interest to our survey's respondents can

be seen in the graph.

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