India is a large country with many centers of delivery of Information Technology (IT) services. It is home to large IT services companies such as Infosys, Wipro etc. where tens of thousands of people execute their jobs on laptops and cell phones using many available communication and collaboration tools that are functional but disparate. It has over 40 million cell phone users and is one of the fastest growing markets for the mobile phone industry. The reason is that the mobile phone is still the only way to communicate between users due to the lack of infrastructure in the wireline telecom.
India is in a unique position of having a huge potential for the use of Unified Communication technologies to increase productivity of information workers and at the same time the biggest hurdle in regulatory restrictions.
India has stringent regulations to disallow calls that originate on VoIP to terminate on PSTN networks and vice-versa within the country. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is the organization that makes recommendations to the Government on such issues. As a result, this limits the use of hybrid PBXs (that are both IP and TDM) by enterprises to route VoIP and TDM calls any which way. However, there is a brief addendum to this regulation that allows PBXs that are partitioned to be used in such a way that IP and TDM calls are not mixed. The calls that originate as VoIP cannot terminate to PSTN networks or vice-versa and the two types of calls are not allowed to be on the same Conference.
The above restriction has not been understood widely and due to this a lot of enterprises have shied away from implementing UC or using regulations a reason for not using UC widely. Various PBX vendors that have implemented logical partitioning use the lack of understanding to their advantage so that enterprises do not look at other new technologies.
Application of Unified Communications to the Indian Market
The technological advances in Unified Communications have essentially brought together the laptop and phone and demonstrated the redundancy of devices. In many emerging markets like Asia and Latin America, it is becoming common for every employee to have a laptop but not a desk phone. In many unregulated markets, people have gotten rid of their phones entirely and started using laptops and headsets. This has greatly increased mobility, ease of use and cost reduction to many companies. A brief analysis of the landscape of enterprises in India, we can categorize some main benefactors of improved communication and collaboration in India. Few examples are described below, but in the future there may be all kinds of users from range of industries benefitting from improved communication techniques.
Software developers:
These users number in tens of thousands that work for domestic and multi-national companies. The users communicate and collaborate with their coworkers, contractors, support teams and customers located around the world. The users are mobile travelling between several locations within the country and also spending weeks and months at client locations in different parts of the world.
Sales and Marketing employees:
These users are very mobile and do communicate with their product teams, sales support teams and customers. Due to the physical infrastructural challenges, often times the biggest challenge that these workers face is time and energy spent to commute between different offices. Good communication and collaboration technology is imperative to these users.
BPO users:
BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) users include call centers, technical support centers, financial back office operations, medical back office operations, KPO (Knowledge Process Outsourcing) etc. These users typically communicate with people in countries such as the US and UK and the international call volumes are huge. In addition to this call center users use a lot of collaborative and Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) applications. UC technologies can not only save costs but only bring in new ways to collaborate for the BPO users.
General business users:
This category of users includes executives, employees in various enterprises that communicate and collaborate locally and sometimes internationally to execute day to day business. UC will unleash enormous possibilities for these users by integrate various modes of communication such as Instant Messaging, Email, Audio/Video conferencing, Telephony onto one platform.
Benefits of Microsoft Unified Communications
Microsoft Unified Communications can provide a great solution that would drastically reduce cost and improve business productivity. Some of the benefits include:
1. Greatly reduced phone calls due to Presence and use of Instant Messaging among Enterprise users.
2. Use of VoIP for all internal calls so that cost of long distance and local calls are reduced to a minimum.
3. Use of VoIP for overseas calling.
4. Greater mobility as the users can use their laptops to communicate and collaborate from wherever they have Internet connectivity.
5. Encourage more home based users so that productivity can be increased and cost reduced by reduction in commute through dense traffic and reduce the usage of valuable real estate.
6. Reduce cost and help the environment by drastic reduction in travel by the use of Live Meeting and Conferencing using OCS.
By deploying Microsoft Unified Communications, enterprises can benefit greatly, the only thing they will not be able to use it is to make or receive PSTN calls within India. But the ubiquitous presence of cell phones in India and the cost of cell phone calls make the use of landline phones for PSTN calling almost redundant. It is not a stretch to imagine Enterprises reduce their PBX phones to a minimum by using them as shared phones or by getting rid of them altogether
Conclusion
There is no reason to wait for regulations to ease before starting to deploy Unified Communications. Enterprises can start implementing right away to realize the benefits stated above. In some ways, Indian enterprises can lead the way in adopting this technology to find ways to circumvent some of the infrastructural hurdles that come in the way of productivity.
TRAI has been open to easing some these regulations. They recently released a consultative paper on IP telephony to which Microsoft along with other vendors gave feedback as well. The paper that can be found at http://www.trai.gov.in/trai/upload/ConsultationPapers/145/cpaper12may08.pdf talks about the potential of IP telephony and recommends easing of regulations with respect to PSTN termination. The Department of Telecommunications is yet to accept these recommendations and pass it into law. Timeframe for this is not known yet but definitely the regulations are on their way out. This gives more reason for enterprises to start adopting the technology today.