The Hindu Business Line : Converging communications, the next ‘wave’

Bangalore, Jan. 27 With enterprises worldwide harnessing a plethora of communication tools – fixed and mobile voice phones, Internet telephony, e-mail, instant messaging, audio and video Web conferencing – it was inevitable that what the poet Milton called ‘confusion, worse confounded’ would soon engulf corporate communications.

To whip these disparate communication modes into a sensible, integrated system, a new discipline called Unified Communications has emerged.

And for Cisco, the US-based networking and router leader, it made sense to offer customers a vertically integrated solution: a bedrock of routers and servers, running company applications, topped by a UC ‘layer’ that enabled co-workers to communicate anytime, anywhere, using any available device.

Key elements of Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager offerings including the Cisco UC Manager Express, were crafted by the companies India-based engineers as well as the company’s R&D partners such as Wipro and Infosys, said Mr Barry O’Sullivan, San Jose (California) US-based Senior Vice President for Cisco’s Voice Technology Group.

He took time off during his visit to the India operation last week to brief Business Line on the emerging contours of UC and Cisco’s own roadmap for this niche.

“IP — Internet Protocol — is driving Unified Communications,” Mr O’Sullivan explained,”

There are 15 million IP phones already in use worldwide. Handsets from Cisco and others already facilitate a seamless switchover from conventional phone networks – landline or cellular – to IP-based connections.

The acquisition last year of Webex, a Web conferencing specialist, co-founded by an Indian, has added another arrow to Cisco’ ‘unified’ offering portfolio.

The IT services sector, banks and financial institutions, and increasing manufacturing sectors are the first movers into US in India, explained Mr Ranajoy Punja, Vice President - Business Development, Advanced Technologies, at Cisco Systems ( India).

The other trend of Software as a Service (SaaS) – where key services are accessed in a pay-per-use mode – may affect UC as well, with companies deciding to use third party providers for their communication needs, Cisco engineers explained.

And when that happens, Indian engineers will be there, helping to make this technology “morphing” happen.

Unified Communication

Unified Communication involves the integration of different communication systems, media, devices and applications.

In practice, it includes fixed and cellular voice communications, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), e-mail, instant messaging, video and audio conferencing, including ‘telepresence’, as well as standard desktop and business applications, combined to create a single communication environment. According to the last Gartner ‘Magic Quadrant’ analysis (Aug 2007) of this niche arena, the leaders are Microsoft, Nortel and Alcatel/Lucent; the challengers are Cisco, IBM and Avaya; the niche players include NEC and Ericsson and among the visionaries are Siemens and Oracle.

The global market for UC is estimated at around $25 billion today, slated to double by 2010.

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