Until now, Australian organisations haven’t had many offerings to pick from when it came to hosted unified communications but this is changing as the UC market is about to be inundated with cloud-based services.
In August this year, Telstra announced a new unified communications offering: a combination of its hosted IP telephony service and Microsoft’s OCS (Office Communications Server). According to Telstra, it’s the first time anyone in Australia has offered OCS-based unified communications as a service.
Since it’s a hosted service, all the software is run on Telstra’s servers and delivered via the customer’s WAN. Customers get the benefits of OCS - such as click-to-call from within Outlook and SharePoint - without having to deploy any servers on-premises, and they get the flexibility of an OPEX model of expenditure.
At the time of launch, Ovum’s UC specialist, Claudio Castelli, called the product “one of the first unified communications in the cloud propositions”.
Only the beginning
But while Telstra’s new service may be the first to bring Microsoft's particular brand of unified communications to the cloud, it's not the first hosted UC application in Australia. Several service providers are already working in this space.
One such provider is SmartSpeak, a subsidiary of TTGroup, which is one of the biggest UC system integrators in Queensland. SmartSpeak has been offering hosted UC services for about 6 months, based on Mitel products.
“Moving forward, people are moving towards the cloud. I think it just makes good business sense,” says Michael Bishop, CIO at SmartSpeak.
This is in spite of some initial concerns regarding the security of cloud computing. Previously, users worried that their data could easily be lost in the cloud or stolen by savvy hackers.
“I think those concerns are starting to become a little bit relaxed,” Bishop says. “That might be due to some of the larger offerings by Google and Microsoft, which are now both providing these cloud solutions as well, which is giving the marketplace some reassurance.”
And it looks as though the burgeoning market, so far dominated by the likes of SmartSpeak, is about to become a lot more crowded. Ovum’s research director Steve Hodgkinson says: “It’s inevitable that all service providers would offer this as part of their computing/telecoms solutions set.”
Integ, traditionally a provider of CPE-based unified communications, is one of those service providers now branching out into hosted UC. This follows the launch of its iTaaS (IP telephony as a service) product 18 months ago which, as the name suggests, is a cloud-based IP telephony service, with email, instant messaging and presence rolled in.
Just this month, Integ launched its iTaaS Conference Centre service, which includes audio, video, web collaboration and document sharing. The service is designed to be layered on top of an existing IP telephony system, be it ITaaS or a system from another provider.
Since iTaaS Conference Centre has only just launched, the company can’t speak of the penetration of hosted UC. But speaking more generally, CEO Ian Poole says cloud-based communications solutions will outstrip premises-based solutions in about three years.
“Uptake of iTaaS is increasing dramatically year on year. The uptake of premises-based solutions is not growing anywhere near the rate the hosted offering is growing,” Poole says.
“That’s not to say that CPE solutions won’t continue, because there are markets out there - like the federal government - that really do still want a CPE solution,” he adds.
According to Poole, the growth of hosted communications will come from very specific sectors: not-for-profit, retail, education, and state and local government. These organisations are usually spread over many sites and have large numbers of users, so they’re well suited to hosted applications: it’s easier and cheaper to deliver an application through the WAN than it is to deploy complex equipment at each location.
The people at SmartSpeak agree that distributed organisations are the ones most interested in hosted solutions - but the SmartSpeak analysis takes a different angle, concluding that the most growth comes from call centres.
“At the moment, that’s definitely our growth area and that’s the business that is coming to us. We have far more call centres than whole-of-business [customers],” Bishop says. “But in saying that, our products right now do support whole-of-business solutions.”
Bishop says call centres have a strong drive to differentiate themselves from the competition with new tools and features, and that’s best done with hosted solutions, which by nature are typically more up to date than on-premises solutions.
SmartSpeak CEO Bob Bishop says: “The world is changing and call centres no longer look like 60 people sitting on the 17th floor. The agents can be spread all over Australia - or the world for that matter - and that’s where a cloud-based model is very attractive. You don’t need to have any concentration of hardware: you can take the service where the people are.”
However, hosted UC isn’t a match for every organisation. CIO Michael Bishop notes that some IT managers simply prefer to have equipment on site and retain ownership of it.
“Control and ownership of data might be two of the major reasons,” he says.
*Andrew Collins is a freelance writer.
