Achieving true UC for Australian businesses

In recent years, many businesses have seen a fundamental shift in the way communication infrastructure and strategy options are heading. In fact, for many, unified communications (UC) has dramatically changed the way in which they operate.

In a recent report, titled The Australian Unified Communication Report 2008, global analyst company Frost & Sullivan found that the Australian UC market had increased by a staggering 31% in 2007 and was estimated to be valued at $484.7 million. Although the term unified communications has been in existence for some years, the research by Frost & Sullivan found that while Australia is yet to see an end-to-end UC deployment, CIO and IT manager awareness of the technology has now reached 100%.

At present, email and telephony constitute the main areas of spending on UC applications in Australia, accounting for 18.5% and 67.2& respectively of total market opportunity in 2007.

“The UC market in Australia is experiencing good growth, awareness and understanding around UC," says Audrey William, senior research manager at Frost & Sullivan.

“When we interviewed CIOs and IT managers [for the report] about what UC was and what it encompassed, many did not have an idea. That has changed this year and most CIOs have an understanding as to what UC entails. CIOs realise the need to allow employees to engage in tools, devices and technologies that are important for day-to-day communications, especially in an era of Web 2.0. That itself will help spur usage of these new technologies within organisations, which will eventually drive the uptake for UC technologies,” she says.

Ed Phillips, solutions manager at Getronics Australia, believes that there is a steady demand locally for UC technology.

“We have already implemented UC to at least 40 of our customers but now we are starting to see more and more strategic deployment integration of technology which, when applied, can help improve the way the workforce operates.

“In some instances, this really gives them a competitive advantage. The challenge for most customers is having the ability to execute that. Even so, we are seeing more and more IT departments partnering and sponsoring us to help them sell the concepts across other lines of business,” he says.

For companies like IBM, UC can be defined in two ways: one that leads to employee productivity through the use of presence, audio/videoconferencing, instant messaging, unified messaging, click to call, video etc; and secondly, when communication tools are integrated into an organisation’s business processes and applications with the goal of optimising business processes by reducing communication delays and improving an organisation’s ability to respond to key issues.

“The UC market is still evolving, says Craig Campbell, business unit executive for integrated communications services at IBM.

“New products and players, partnerships and alliances keep redefining the UC market and what is possible in a UC environment. Uptake of true unified communications (UC business process) has been slow, due to the lack of understanding around what UC truly is.”

Audrey William agrees adding that to achieve true UC, you have to get the network and the infrastructure ready as a base level step.

“For many organisations that have not done this as a first step, achieving true UC will be a challenge. UC is not a single product. It is a journey for a customer and as such it will start by having the basic infrastructure in place. In some cases, organisations will deploy a technology that is crucial to its day-to-day operations and look at other applications in the UC stack over time.

“For example, for workers in healthcare, mobility UC solutions would gain good traction. In education and other healthcare areas, there will be greater interest around procuring conferencing and collaboration applications. So UC cannot be deployed in totality but in a piecemeal approach as each organisation’s requirements will be unique and different depending on its needs but future uptake is very positive,” she says.

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