With today’s technology-driven work culture driving demand for enterprise mobility, IT leaders are looking for the right set of unified communication tools to connect their workplace.
And most importantly, today’s business users expect to collaborate anywhere and using any device, with any workload. This is prompting enterprise towards better unified communication ecosystem that can drive their future workplace.
According to Zubair Alam, General Manager, Enterprise Business, NEC India, adoption of UCC applications by Indian enterprises may not be at par with global one’s currently, but they are gaining precedence amongst Indian businesses who are opening up to them just like their global counterparts.
“Currently, 52% Indian firms support UCC applications while 26% are planning to adopt them in the next two years. Indian firms have a positive approach for future UCC investment and it is estimated that 44% of Indian enterprises plan to invest in mobilizing UCC in order to maximize the productivity benefits from UCC.
According to an IDC report, collaborative technology market is projected to grow at 25 percent in 2014. Considering this trend, it is forecasted that globally the incremental uptake rates for UCC will range from 10% to 22% across all UCC applications in the next year; while in India, the expected incremental uptake range is 16% to 26%,” he adds on.
NEC has recently launched its latest generation of unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) platform, Univerge 3C, targeting mid-market and enterprise customers with 100 to more than 1,000 users. NEC further plans to target 25,000 of its telephony customers in India.
“Our portfolio is aligned to provide software defined networking, data center servers, application & virtualization assurance and management, network storage and archival, unified communications & collaboration, contact centers, virtualized desktops, and desktop & mobile communications devices. We package solutions for customer environments that include enterprises, small and medium businesses, and service providers,” he explains.
Talking about the size of Indian UC market, Vijay Sampathkumar, Country Leader Enterprise Solutions Group – Global Commercial Channels, Dell India says that the Unified Communications market is fairly large due to the clear RoI that it offers.
“Organisations today realise that they can streamline their business processes and boost productivity, reliability, and competitiveness with the help of UCC and this is pushing sales for UC in India and globally. IDC recently released a study titled Unified Communications and Collaboration Survey report which gathered the opinions on the topic from across the Asia-Pacific Region. The study found that there is a strong interest among enterprises for Unified Communications. Around 40 percent of the respondents have already deployed these solutions; nearly 35 percent are looking to roll-out the services within one-two years. The most recently published report of the UC market in India (by IDC), however found that the a marginal decline of 2.3% in 1H13 as compared to 1H12 chiefly due to the 10% decline in Enterprise Telephony. However other aspects of Unified Communications such as videoconferencing has seen a huge traction due to the business benefits it provides. The India Contact Centre market also saw an increase with a 4% Year-on-Year (YoY) growth in 1H13, despite the continued threat from the Philippines,” he explains.
Speaking about the company’s strategy for unified communications, Hrishi Parthsarthy, Director, Alliances and Partnerships India & SAARC, Avaya says that the unified communications industry in India is poised to grow.
“We see growth in the adoption of IP Telephony by Enterprises (both large and mid-size) and also the small business. Enterprises will continue to deploy applications to deliver breakthrough experience and increase productivity. Mobility applications, and conferencing (audio, video and web) will continue to grow. One of the key factors contributing to this market growth is the increasing need for information sharing among organizations. Also, cloud based access is making unified communication available for a wider range of organizations and end users in India and all over the world. The shift from on-premises to cloud based unified communication model will be the key driver for unified communication to grow in the future,” he adds on.
Emphasizing on the importance of channel partners in terms of establishing the go to market strategy, Avaya is launching new programs specifically designed to enable more channel partners in this rapidly growing space – accelerating their time to revenue.
“We have an active incentive program in place, and have further programs launching in 2014 to ensure we grow in partnership together with those channel partners. One element of that was our recently launched iConnect program which provides a range of support programs, training and marketing initiatives to support growth in this mid-sized business segment. Avaya’s go-to-market strategy in India is majorly through channels. In the last two years we have been focusing on the growth of our multi-channel model. Avaya has an extensive network of platinum, gold, silver and authorized partners as part of our global Avaya Connect channel partner program,” he adds on.
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