Unified Communication: Breaking barriers

Unified Communication (UC) has now become the new call of many organisations. UC is believed to be the future for business communication and promises to abring about organisational productivity, in terms of effective business communication.

The centric theme UC seeks to address is to break the barriers between various communication devices. UC software solution encompasses incorporation of voice, email, instant messaging and multimedia conferencing, into single sized application.

This UC application will be positioned to seamlessly interconnect, email, instant messaging, cellular and VoIP (voice-over-IP) telephony, along with audio-, video-, and web-conferencing.  

With enterprises, staring at the age of convergence, most devices would be triple play (data, voice and video) enabled, and business communication has to be seemingly connected, irrespective of the underlying hybrid communication architecture, ranging from a PSTN network to a wireless network.

Applications

Let’s look at a practical example to understand UC :

What if you could call a document’s author to ask a question, simply by clicking on his/her name in the text? Or display a power point presentation to someone over a video conference, while you are at the airport?

This could also extend to a phone ringing at your extension, and assume that you are on travel, the call ringing at your extensions can be re-routed to your PC/mobile phones, by means of the resident UC software on the PC/mobile phone.

The UC architecture, relies heavily on Session Initiation Protocol standard (SIP), besides the UC software. SIP is an RFC standard from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and is a text-based signaling protocol, for initiating interactive communication sessions such as voice, video, chat, interactive games, and virtual reality. SIP enables companies to bind together diverse multimedia and collaboration applications, into a single medium.

UC and its vendors

Microsoft and Nortel joined forces in July 2006, and formed the Innovative Communications Alliance to encourage enterprises to perform the transition to VoIP, and unified communications.

Unified Communication Solutions, from Microsoft and Nortel combines, enables UC software to reside in hardware communication devices as a single unified solution, and is presented to the end user as a simple icon in the application he wishes to use.

Other vendors primarily include Cisco, Avaya and others. On Cisco’s UC solution, the difference comes in terms of UC residing in the network. Observes, Minhaj Zia Business Development Manger for Unified Communications in India & SAARC “Cisco UC system is built to fully leverage converged networks and Service Oriented architecture SOA/SONA frameworks. It uses open standards such as XML, vXML, SIP/SIMPLE, HTTP, and SOAP to virtualise voice, video, presence, and mobility services within the Intelligent Information Network. Once available within the IP fabric, these services can be delivered securely to any device, anywhere, anytime, across multiple applications-dramatically improving collaboration and transforming the user experience.”

Target markets

Adoption of UC is ideal to business people on the move, and most of it can be deployed at call centers, BPO’s units, hospitals and the list would be growing.

Who Stands to win From UC ?

Telco operators stand to gain as more revenues to Telco operators, as deploying UC brings in revenues in form of call charges, and organisations and its employees, stand to gain as efficiency, and real time decision making tasks can be performed.

Minhaj observes “Unified communications helps firms make better use of existing application investments and at the same time provides the ability to tie the applications together to create a more effective collaborative work experience for its employees”

Summing up UC promises to bring-in, a catalyst change in how business communication would be done in future times, with faster decision making and better customer satisfaction.

Source: www.decanherald.com