31st August 2011With bank holiday week in full swing and the BCN team currently on holiday (who do they think they are?!), we handed over to Shervin Bakhtiari, Principal Consultant for Actel Consulting, and an in-depth assessment of the unified communications (UC) market. Why is UC being heralded as the saviour of small and medium-sized businesses? And what role will cloud computing play in its adoption? Part one of two helps answer these questions and more.
Cloud-Based Voice & Unified Communications
By Shervin Bakhtiari, Actel Consulting
Due to accelerated innovation and increased availability of cloud computing, enabled by ubiquitous high-speed connectivity, service providers can now offer their customers cloud services beyond “near real-time” applications - email, CRM, or storage – and start to offer “real time” applications, such as enterprise Unified Communications (UC), inclusive of traditional voice & (IP) PBX functionality.
Service providers have the opportunity to shift the enterprise capital expenditure on CPE to operational expenditure on cloud services, while creating additional customer “stickiness” by offering more comprehensive solutions with on-demand elasticity. However, traditional UC providers will need to adapt their solutions to meet the changing needs and expectations of users by increasing usability and features, rethinking the design architecture, and addressing ongoing issues such as bandwidth and security.
Market Trends
The definition of service provider for UC is expanding beyond traditional fixed or converged telecom operators to include mobile operators and ISP/ASPs, which are also entering the market for Cloud UC services.
A recent Juniper Research report indicated that mobile cloud-based enterprise services are expected to reach $39bn by 2016 with mobile operators offering a variety of UC solutions. Gartner recently categorised Mobile UC as having a “transformational impact” resulting in major benefits to enterprises by transforming their business operations. Furthermore, many Over-the-Top players who provide traditional hosted/cloud services such as email, web hosting, storage, etc., are also enhancing their product offering by providing voice and UC services to their business customers; Google and Microsoft/Skype are such example but many national or regional players also exist.
Another important trend in the market is the “consumerisation of IT” which has been led by innovative products from the likes of Skype or Apple delivering intuitive and easy-to-use user interfaces, (near) automatic configuration, and all-in-one functionality allowing “non-techies” to enjoy new and advanced technologies.
No longer are users willing to accept the limitations of location-restricted, device, network, or OS specific applications. They expect to have intuitive solutions and applications accessible from any location, utilising multiple devices on various networks – mobile, home, hotel, or public hotspots. Gartner predicts that by 2014, 90% of organizations will support corporate applications on personal devices including tablets/pads.
However, if enterprise IT does not provide the type of applications or features that employees are using in their personal lives, then users will turn to consumer cloud applications, such as collaboration or storage, even though these may not meet the enterprise security or business process requirements.
Benefits for SME Customers
Small and medium size enterprises (SMEs), which depending on country/region may be defined as businesses from 5 to 500 employees, are a market segment that will greatly benefit from cloud-based voice & UC services. It is also a market segment more likely to be early adopters of cloud services as it allows them to refresh and grow their IT solutions without large capital expenditure and IT staff expenditure by utilizing cost effective and more predictable pay-as-you-go pricing models.
Traditionally, SME’s have not been able to procure and implement more advanced UC features such as video, collaboration, presence, ACD/contact center, and mobile integration due to prohibitive product and project costs. Through this enhanced level of access to services, in many ways, the cloud serves as a great equalizer for SMEs, because it allows them to use new and advanced applications and tools, made affordable as cloud services, which enables them to be more productive and competitive by focusing on growing their core business and profitability.
Emerging UC Solutions
Unfortunately many of the current UC platforms that service providers deploy to launch their cloud UC service are glue-on components on top of traditional enterprise voice/(IP)PBX or IP Centrex solutions. Firstly, most of these solutions are device and/or number-centric use models. Secondly, the many add-on components required to provide the new UC functionality not only create a disconnected and non-uniform user experience, but also require heavy effort for back-end system integration, provisioning, and life cycle management, resulting in long deployment projects. Furthermore, many of these solutions still require proprietary hardware components, making them more difficult to deploy in a true virtualized cloud and elastic environment. These issues result in less attractive solutions, long delay to market, as well as higher maintenance and operation costs resulting in lower profitability.
The emerging “next generation” enterprise and UC solutions must be user–centric, so that the features and behavior of the system cater to user’s status/presence, location, network, and devices, as seamlessly as possible. As well then solutions must provide comprehensive, all-in-one suites of capabilities ranging from traditional PBX features, intelligent routing, rich presence & IM, unified messaging, self-service portal, multimodal conferencing and collaboration, contact centers, as well as softphones and smartphone/pads clients. Additional technologies such as location-based or location-aware features, seamless session handling (moving an active session from one device to another), social media integration, and enterprise (intra-domain) social media features will soon be required by users as part of any UC solution.
Shervin Bakhtiari is a multi-disciplinary ICT professional and evangelist with fifteen years of experience driving emerging technology evaluation and adoption for a wide variety of customers and clients including Telco/Mobile, enterprise verticals such as financials, as well as angel & venture investments. He currently holds the position of Principal Consultant with Actel Consulting, a leading specialist strategy and technology consulting firm.
Stay tuned for part two of Shervin's analysis of the unified communications market, to be published on Monday 5th September.
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Tags: unified communications | mobile cloud
