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Even as Unified Communications gains traction among large enterprises in India, the technology is also getting the attention of small and medium enterprises. Vibhu Ranjan, Director, Unified Communications Group, Microsoft India in an email interview with Sonal Desai dwelled extensively on the UC opportunity in India.
 Q: What are the targets Microsoft has set for UC in 2008 both worldwide and for India?
A: Today, more than 1,000 companies are delivering services and solutions based on Microsoft’s UC software. The UC market is an estimated $45billion opportunity globally. In India, the UC market is at a nascent stage and it is too early to predict or forecast targets at this stage. However, we believe that for an enterprise which has multiple offices across geographies, communication and collaboration is critical to succeed in 24X7, always on always connected business environment. Hence, in India too as businesses are going global and even expanding domestically, deployment of software-centric communication collaboration solutions will become important. According to IDC, top Indian companies spent Rs. 7123 crore on deploying Information Technology systems in 2006-07, a growth of 27% over the previous year. This year Indian enterprises are expected to invest 26% more on IT taking the combined spend to Rs.8974 crore.
Unified Communications solutions assume more significance in a country like India, which has a mushrooming mobile workforce and the increasing popularity of company policies like flexi-timings; work-from-home that creates the constant need to keep workforce connected all the time. Unified Communications provides a seamless way to do this, through multiple modes of communication and also allows IT decision makers to provide an integrated, low-cost, high-productivity communication infrastructure.
Furthermore, the rising globalization is forcing even small and medium businesses to become more and more efficient and look at ways to improve employee productivity. Technology is being seen as enabler to cut costs and increase bottomline.
Q: Who will be the early adopters in India?
A: We have had an extremely successful OCS 2007 beta program resulting in more than 100,000 customer downloads worldwide of OCS 2007. In India, NIIT Technologies and Marico industries have been the early adopters of Office Communications Server 2007.
Today, verticals like IT/ITeS, BFSI, manufacturing, are seeing adoption of UC. We should see the adoption in the light of the growing change in today’s business landscape – workers are increasingly more mobile and working globally. In the last year, workers experienced a 20% increase in emails received on their mobile devices (Harris Interactive Study). Unified communications addresses the challenges of working in this business climate. This trend is particularly dominant in India, which has a mushrooming mobile workforce. To add to this trend, is the increasing popularity of company policies like flexi-timings; work-from-home that create the constant need to keep workforce connected all the time. Therefore, you would see that most verticals/ industries have the potential to use UC products and solutions.
In India, there are companies like Marico Industries and NIIT technologies are early adopters of Microsoft’s UC solutions.
Q: Do you expect SMBs to adopt UC in a major way? How big do you think is the market for UC among SMBs?
A: While it is true that Unified communications still has not taken hold in the small and medium-sized business (SMB) space in a big way, we believe that SMBs face numerous challenges that can be mitigated with a UC deployment. The increasingly global economy has placed greater pressure on SMBs to become more flexible in order to compete, which means increased employee productivity, shorter response times and quick information-driven decision making.
We have seen that SMBs have a need for high-end messaging services; however they don’t have the necessary expertise or the resources to deploy such services. In such a scenario, hosted, low-cost and easily accessible services are preferred by the small and mid-market enterprises. Microsoft has tied up with Nortel to integrate its Communication Server 2000 softswitch with the Microsoft Hosted Messaging and Collaboration which will be able to equip SMB and enterprise workers with tools such as click- to-call, as well as traditional voice communications and in/outbound dialing from their Microsoft Office Communicator desktop client.
Q: VSNL is currently providing hosted messaging and collaboration services for SMBs. Can we expect more such hosted offerings through telco companies going forward? Can we also expect the services to be offered by other hosted and SAAS service providers in the coming year?
A: Microsoft will continue to work with telcos and other hosting partners to provide affordable hosted messaging and collaboration services to SMB customers in India. At this point, we are not at the liberty to disclose the names of these hosting partners and their offerings.
Q: How will Microsoft place its UC offering vis-à-vis Cisco and IBM?
A: Unlike competition, Microsoft has a software-based approach towards unified Communications. Advances in technology have made VoIP and video over IP possible, increasing the importance of software in voice and video communications and driving an industry shift from network-centric systems to software.
Software-powered communications and collaboration tools ignite productivity, reduce costs and ultimately create competitive advantage. Software brings:
- More rapid innovation, enabling businesses to leverage technology advances more quickly.
- New possibilities to incorporate communications into everyday business processes.
- Ability to reduce costs by leveraging existing investments and giving IT more control.
- Improved insight and collaboration by giving people at-a-glance availability and the ability to click-to-communicate from within the applications, networks and devices people know and use.
- A foundation for future communications capabilities.
The strength and completeness of Microsoft’s Software led approach for Unified Communications has also been recognized by Gartner in their recently published Magic Quadrant 07 – a competitive mapping of multiple vendors - for Unified Communications with Microsoft in the Leaders’ quadrant for the second year in a row.
Having said that, the market for unified communications is just emerging and many vendors have a shared commitment to interoperability in order to truly fulfill the promise of integrating all business communications into a seamless and unified experience for customers. You have and will continue to see us partner with a broad set of communications companies, as we work to integrate phone communications into the rich, software-based collaborative experience on the desktop.
Q: John Chambers in a recent interview did say that Cisco would collaborate with Microsoft for UC. Now, in a scenario where Microsoft and Cisco are pegged as competitors in this space, what is the scope of collaboration and in which areas. (Also, Cisco’s acquisition of Webex has also to an extent helped the network major work towards its software policy).
A: Cisco Systems and Microsoft Corp. are working together to provide collaborative real-time capabilities for businesses through the integration of Microsoft® Office Communicator 2005 and the open Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 with the new SIP-based Cisco Unified Communications system.
Cisco and Microsoft have agreed to work together to create a converged solution that will provide desktop Internet Protocol (IP) telephony call control. Cisco’s SIP interface allows customers to build solution sets to meet their business needs with flexibility and simplicity. To enable this solution, Microsoft Office Live Communications Server and Microsoft Office Communicator will interoperate with the new Cisco Unified CallManager.
The new communications solution from Cisco and Microsoft will allow customers to do the following:
- Click to call as well as transfer phone calls from Office Communicator, eliminating the need for users to act as human middleware
- Launch or answer a phone call from within Office Communicator, and choose to conduct the call from a computer or a desk phone
- View Cisco Unified IP Phone presence status from within Office Communicator, providing users with an expanded view of presence information
- Transparently escalate between Office Communicator instant messaging and voice sessions, enabling users to communicate more effectively
Q: When will you integrate your UC into office software, can you give us a glimpse into the roadmap thereafter?
A: Microsoft works closely with many PBX partners to deliver an integrated communications experience. Microsoft will continue to work with these innovative partners as we explore ways to deliver deeper integration of 3rd party call controls, enterprise SIP and interoperability in collaboration solutions. The combination of Microsoft technologies, acquired innovations and great partnerships will equate to a flexible set of solutions that meet the unique real-time communications needs of our customers.
Q: What is the potential for IP telephony and IP based communications in India?
A: VoIP is fast becoming the part of the communications technology that will be playing a significant role in the IP networks space. India has a huge potential for VoIP growth as its companies become more global and the need to productively and cost effectively interact with its customers and partners becomes more critical.
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