Ease of Business: Practical considerations for UC deployment -

By Vishy Gopalakrishnan, Assistant Vice-President, product Marketing Management, Unified Communications & Collaboration, AT&T

Asia-Pacific companies of all sizes are using unified communications (UC) to enhance their productivity and innovation by making it easier for the staff to collaborate. But why are more businesses in the region not adopting UC or those that have already deployed these solutions are not making full use of them?

According to many IT executives, a clearer understanding of what UC is and what it can do is needed in Asia Pacific. UC can be defined as multiple communication and collaboration tools, unified behind a single user interface that is accessible on multiple fixed and mobile devices.

To get up to speed on UC technology, there are three realities to keep in mind.

Your business needs will shape your UC solution and evolve it

If you have communication and collaboration tools like voice calling, email and instant messaging you have already laid the groundwork for a UC solution. The next step is to select the combination of tools you need and add new features such as mobility and presence to it. It is important to base your decisions on your business needs and merge your UC solution with the tools and business processes used every day.

Inevitably, what you need your UC to do will change over time as you require a reliable, scalable webconferencing solution that offers multiple meeting solutions best suited to your business needs. For example, we are now seeing a highly mobile Asian workforce wanting to use webconferencing solutions to keep in touch through mobile devices. AT&T provides a rich array of global audio capabilities, in conjunction with high definition video and in-depth WebEx? webconferencing features. As a result, attendees can join conferences with local and in-country phone numbers in over 150 countries, helping improve performance and reliability, and reduce meeting-related costs.

Your UC solution may include multiple vendors that are not exactly ?unified?

UC is not a single technology, application or service. A UC solution may include multiple IT vendors, UC tool providers, mobile carriers and operating systems. Managing a multivendor environment can be difficult, especially across borders in the Asia-Pacific region, where vastly different technologies, standards and regulatory regimes will be encountered. This is made more challenging given the task of recruiting staff with the skills to manage a secure UC infrastructure in-house.

In the past, disparate UC systems have made seamless collaboration problematic. The AT&T UC Federation now allows suppliers, partners and customers to communicate in real time across different supported platforms.

A UC solution can save you money when it is correctly deployed

UC services can help you simplify your infrastructure and make the best use of existing equipment. Deploying tools and solutions that are suitable for your people and business environment can lead to improved access to information, streamlined processes and reduced meeting-related travel expenses.

The case for cloud UC

Embracing these realities means looking seriously at UC as a managed service through the cloud. Cloud UC offers many advantages over traditional prem-ises-based UC solutions.

On cloud, you can mesh your office and mobile environments, providing UC functionality and a high level of security across diverse devices, platforms and networks. You can also rapidly scale up and out across Asia Pacific and the world.

With a managed UC system, you get a single point of responsibility for the entire range of multivendor UC solutions and services. This can greatly simplify network management and make it easier to keep up to date with the latest upgrades and releases. Furthermore, you can often exchange a capital investment for an operating expense. Cloud UC may not require an upfront investment and lets you use the equipment and applications you already have. In addition, many UC services allow you to pay per seat based on your requirements, and include maintenance, support and upgrade costs in the service fee. This makes it easier for IT executives to make a business case for these services as they can more readily calculate the expected return on investment. For example, a multi-national recently deployed a UC service to integrate IP telephony and audio conferencing on cloud. It significantly reduced its Asia-Pacific communications costs while avoiding capital investment and enhancing the quality.

With a managed cloud UC service, you are also free to focus on making the solution work for you, rather than making the technologies work together. The most successful Asia-wide UC deployments I have seen had three things in common: