Feature

VoIP: riding on UC

VoIP is considered as the core component of UC, which not only enhances the delivery of UC services but also results in increased business benefits, writes Nivedan Prakash

The Indian market has started extensively adopting unified communications (UC) with industries across major verticals deploying UC applications.

The migration to IP telephony is one of the key trends being witnessed in the Indian UC marketplace. Most of the adoption of UC is centered on IP telephony, with enterprise customers preferring to adopt a phased deployment approach.

According to a forecast by Frost & Sullivan, on UC in India, the total market size of UC was approximately $670 million in 2008, which is likely to grow to over $1 billion by 2010. The majority of this includes enterprise IP telephony (almost 50%) and applications like presence, mobility and conferencing and collaboration are around 10%. The highest growth area is around these applications, which add the maximum value to end-users.

The recent 2009 study titled, Meetings Around the World II: Charting the Course of Advanced Collaboration, sponsored by Verizon and Cisco, provided an interesting perspective on how professionals in businesses and government agencies get their work done by using advanced collaboration tools such as VoIP, instant messaging, presence or meeting via high-definition video.

The new study also showed that VoIP is leading the way when it comes to the delivery of advanced communications and collaboration applications. IT managers, who were once skeptical of VoIP compared with traditional telephony, are leveraging IP networking investments today for more advanced forms of communication and collaboration tools.

Minhaj Zia, National Sales Manager, Cisco India and SAARC, pointed out that Cisco’s core business is enabling an IP based network platform and that it is the leading supplier of IP PBX solutions with 25.2% (Q2, CY 2009, Frost & Sullivan) of the market. As per the regulations laid out by the Government of India, VoIP calls can be made and received in India within closed user groups, i.e., within the same organization. Calls landing on PSTN phones cannot be initiated from a VoIP phone. Therefore, customers are using a combination of both VoIP and PSTN to deploy a complete UC solution.

Stepping stone to UC

In today’s dynamic business environment, perhaps the most important benefit comes from having a phone system that can change and grow at a moment’s notice, enabling new capabilities for more effective communications, streamlining business processes, and improving profitability.

Some of the factors that are influencing the growth of VoIP solutions are an increase in PC penetration, a rise in the adoption of converged networks by the corporate sector, growth in the consumer communication services segment (PCOs and cyber cafés), thereby driving entrepreneurship and employment, fall in communications costs (local and international) through other devices like landlines, mobiles, etc., increase of traffic minutes within and from India, and considerable increase in tele-density.

Sanish KB, Research Analyst at Gartner, asserted, “We could see traction towards voice because users get centralized management of voice communication. If we talk about enterprises, implementations are happening in the Indian market. VoIP is the stepping stone to UC and is one of the main components in it. People who were using traditional infrastructure up till are now moving towards VoIP.”

“As VoIP delivers telephony on IP, it makes the infrastructure less complex to deploy, manage and maintain. On the other hand, traditional ISDN-based systems can be really complex to deploy across several locations. Furthermore, it becomes even more complex to truly unify all the other parts of UC easily over non-IP environments,” added Muneyb Minhazuddin, Senior Solutions Manager, Avaya Asia Pacific.

One of the main reasons behind VoIP being preferred over other platforms is that it utilizes packet switching as against circuit switching, which is the case with TDM networks. This essentially means that there are no geographical limitations for VoIP endpoints and the SoftSwitch/Media Gateway and the VoIP phones/UC clients could be located anywhere in the Internet cloud. It is this flexibility that has propelled the use of VoIP.

The other major benefit is the use of Open Protocols like SIP which enable multiple applications to be developed for use with the UC platform. This ensures greater availability and support for these applications. Also most carriers are switching to Next Generation Networks that allow such services to be delivered seamlessly using IP technology.

Lavanya Palani Batcha, Senior Research Analyst, SAME, ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan, explained, “IP telephony is indeed believed to be the first step towards adopting full-blown UC in the enterprise. Many UC applications such as conferencing and collaboration, unified client, unified messaging, presence and integrated UC applications, and mobility can be leveraged optimally only with an underlying IP-based network architecture. Traditional networks are slow and cannot support bandwidth intensive applications such as videoconferencing or telepresence.”

Advantages to customers

One of the fundamental advantages for customers is the overall reduction of TCO in the long-term. Typically, traditional platforms such as Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) require separate voice and data cables running to each end-user desktop. However, with IP telephony, one single cable performs the function of carrying both voice and data traffic. This results in a significant reduction of cabling costs for the enterprise.

“The primary advantage is easier integration into applications. It is much easier to write an application that can call someone or e-mail someone from the same platform. The other advantage is on the infrastructure side. If a network is being deployed for the first time—you may choose not to not roll out additional infrastructure for voice in terms of wiring, specialized hardware, etc.,” commented Kiran Nataraj, Senior Domain Expert–Telecom Business Unit at Persistent Systems.

Amit Mehta, Director–Unified Communication, Microsoft India, stated that VoIP enhances the delivery of UC services and it is seen as a new way wherein people can collaborate together while cutting the costs involved in travel and communication. “It is facilitating the convergence of different modes of communication so that there is accessibility anytime and anywhere. VoIP in UC has brought about a paradigm shift in businesses today,” pointed out Mehta.

This IP-based architecture would enable organizations to have all office-to-office telephone calls riding over the corporate data network, similar to other applications. Since the new architecture is built on IP and SIP, the new system can easily integrate with legacy systems from multiple vendors through the use of cost-effective SIP gateways.

Ashwani Tikko, GM–Service Delivery, CSC India, said, “VoIP gives flexibility to take care of remote workers, which is one of the prime drivers for its usage apart from the much talked about cost effectiveness once the system is deployed. Companies can integrate the remote and mobile workforce into the overall communication landscape. Besides, VoIP helps eliminate physical limitations.”

Meanwhile, organizations are discovering why VoIP is such a powerful tool for maintaining a competitive edge. When businesses switch to an IP-based unified communications system, they find that an increase in productivity by combining and simplifying communication tools. This will help secure voice and data and will make it easier for employees to maintain access to the network, whether at work or at home.

“Customers can deploy a VoIP solution as part of their overall UC and collaboration strategic plan without a full UC deployment and enjoy such cost savings benefits as on Net dialing, least cost routing, and physical voice infrastructure investment that will be leveraged in the future as part of the organization’s UC and collaboration strategic plan, while enabling users and the company to enjoy a robust telephony infrastructure with the capacity to handle future growth and moves without the restrictions faced by PABX infrastructure,” said Benjamin Green, UC Practice Manager-Asia Pacific, Verizon Business.

Stumbling blocks

The stumbling blocks might come in two forms—firstly, there is the cost factor and secondly, there are regulatory issues, wherein the DoT TRAI regulations in India prevent an internal enterprise VoIP network from seamlessly integrating with PSTN. Besides, customers who already have existing infrastructure and might have invested in other solutions would think twice before going in for VoIP deployments. It’s not easy to completely migrate from one platform to another in one day, as the deployment involves a substantial investment.

Girish Bhandarkar, Head-Product Propositions and Presales, BT India, conceded that one of the stumbling blocks hindering large-scale VoIP and UC deployments is the ability to ensure that all communications are secure, and that they support corporate information security policies, especially for organizations that handle credit card information, patient records, or other proprietary data. There is an issue of toll fraud in the VoIP context and “how to protect your enterprise from falling victim to this rising crime.”

One of the key challenges is the relatively high pricing of IP phones. Interoperability is another issue that needs to be resolved. Not all phones, soft phones, gateways, call managers are interoperable as they support some proprietary variant of a standard protocol. This limits enterprises from freely mixing and matching components.

Shivkumar Jagannath, CTO of Zylog Systems India, is of the view that UC has still not found a foothold in the Indian market. The primary reason for many enterprises shying away from this technology is the stringent regulatory environment that prevents the termination of VOIP with PSTN within the country. The only way most organizations use any form of UC is through ISDN based video conferencing solutions. This has now started changing with more companies shifting to IP-based solutions as these become more available and affordable than ISDN.

The other bottlenecks are the lack of good broadband infrastructure, the high cost of bandwidth (when compared with mature markets) and lack of conviction about ROI when deploying UC.

The road ahead

According to Frost & Sullivan’s Annual Tracker 2009, IP telephony in the Indian market within the enterprise and not consumer VoIP has been pegged at $203 million in 2010. The report projected the growth of 5.5% from 2008 till 2015.

The last decade has seen the greatest technological shift in voice communications for over a century. The maturing of IP-based voice transport has seen the world of telecommunication undergoing a tectonic shift. IP-based voice is today universally regarded as the future of telecommunications. Previously, data went over voice networks as it was a small constituent of the overall telecommunications traffic.

“It will be more popular in the enterprise segment. Big enterprises will largely be making use of unified communications. Later, smaller companies will also start using it to gain competitive advantages in their business. It not only gives a cost advantage but also makes it easier for people to interact from their own locations. VoIP will become the obvious medium for doing actual talking,” added Vadiraj Aralappanavar, Head - Mobile Applications, MindTree.

Meanwhile, almost all the major vendors are offering UC solutions. What is more interesting is that there are many Open Source UC platforms such as Druid and Fonality emerging, which could ultimately lead to the widespread adoption and deployment of these platforms. This is when UC will go beyond the enterprise and into the homes and hands of individual customers and service providers will use cloud computing to offer UC as a value added service.

It is certainly safe to the say that the market is moving ahead in terms of migration to and adoption of IP telephony as a beginning. Several new setups have gone the IP telephony way. The price points for IP telephony lines and phones are expected to decline in the future and this could prove to be a significant driver for further interest in and adoption of IP telephony and UC.

Usage of VoIP in UC is on an upswing. Today, organizations are either adopting or building the basis for the deployment of UC in the future.

nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com