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June - 2015 issue

Unified Communications: Deciphering the Right Combination

By Vignesh Anantharaj

With the advent of the BYOD phenomenon and enterprise mobility in general, organizations can no longer neglect the importance of state of the art unified communication tools. With enterprises continuing to tackle the prospect of moving a solution from the pilot phase to final production stage, enterprises today combine the traditional options of on premise deployments with that of optimizations provided through hosted deployments. A perfect balance can be achieved wherein the media and federation areas reflect in the cloud while the core infrastructures and applications are on premise.
Although the unified communications market is forecasted to grow from $13.10 billion in 2014 to $23.34billion in 2019, at a compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 12.2% from 2014 to 2019, the common problems of high initial costs, complexities, and the non predictive RoI associated with this technology have negatively affected the growth of the unified communications market.
Some of the major issues faced have been the enterprise community’s inability to harness the full potential of the cloud into its UC plans. There is also a growing concern than many UC vendors view the technology in a very broad aspect, hence exposing the inability to assess specific details. Another angle to note is around the surge in interest in enterprise mobility as a strategy to increase productivity. The unwritten rule lays down that UC has to be tied to Smartphones, desktops and handheld devices which has become an evolutionary nature of this growing trend. Hence it is imperative that unified communication deployment should not be viewed as a single project but as a combination of many sub projects revolving around telephony, messaging, call processing, instant messaging, presence, conferencing and collaboration, notification and business process integration. It is advisable for managers to identify and investigate key objectives of the organization to decide what features are needed as part of a UC practice.
Today, as CIOs’ delve deeper into IT Infrastructures and work across continents to work seamlessly, we have put together the 10 most promising UC solution providers in Singapore. We are sure that these companies can highlight the missing gaps in your UC strategy and provide an overall better experience and we are sure you will agree to the same.

Do let us know what you think.

Vignesh Anantharaj
Managing Editor
vignesh@cioreview.in