Artilium

Friday, October 26, 2007

24/7 Financial Services Sector Takes The lead In UC…

By definition, Unified Communications (UC) includes a group of technologies that integrate voice with other features such as email, instant messaging, presence and videoconferencing. But it can be much more.

Forrester Research, for example, takes the view that UC has become the inclusive name for a converging set of voice, data and video infrastructure services that integrate with common business applications to reduce typical communication bottlenecks. 

In this scenario, Forrester says, UC tools and technologies link communication technologies (such as voice) with collaboration services (email, calendaring, instant messaging and presence) to improve information workers’ ability to interact with co-workers quickly and effortlessly. Functionality enabled by session initiation protocol (SIP) eliminates communication channel silos and provides services like presence, integrated messaging, multimodal conferencing, desktop call control and asynchronous collaboration integration to accelerate business responsiveness. 

It makes perfect business sense – but now the pressure is on UC vendors to do more than offer clear visions of their product road maps; they must communicate the business benefits a fully integrated, unified platform can deliver. One could argue that the imprecise view of what UC includes and how it can contribute to a company’s bottom line may have played a part in slower adoption up to this point.

However, this is set to change as IT executives, CIOs and decision-makers grasp how UC will revolutionize and recharge their businesses. In a nutshell, UC will arm businesses with the ability to solve issues more quickly and eliminate communication delays that impact business productivity. Supported by UC tools, workers can collaborate with colleagues anywhere to solve business problems on an immediate basis.  This is possible because UC solutions eliminate technology silos and integrate applications to provide richer functionality for existing desktop and communication applications.

As companies adopt real-time response as the norm, UC will be core to conducting all mission-critical business functions.  But UC is not reserved for the major leagues and big business. As this recent blog points out, UC is a technology sea change in which SMEs can participate. [http://www.searchvoip.com.au/topics/article.asp?DocID=6100856]

Indeed, SMEs can participate now – and without waiting for cost reductions based on widespread enterprise adoption. In fact, some companies may be able to move faster and use unified communications to compete better against larger companies.After all, UC is driven by new applications for collaboration that take advantage of more affordable converged voice and data networks.

And it’s much more than IP telephony, although that is a critical component. The fact that information traditionally transmitted over voice lines can now travel over data lines means that faxes and voice mails can now appear in your inbox. Viewing your voice mails alongside your e-mails and clicking on the most important ones is much simpler than having to listen to them in sequence — even though it might take some getting used to. This capability alone could bring significant productivity gains for employees in the office and on the road.

Companies in the financial sector need little convincing, as this insight post from Australian IT points out. [http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,22433429-24169,00.html] It outlines precisely how IP telephony and UC can take customer relationship management to a new level, and provides some interesting examples of financial services companies that have implemented solutions to achieve just that.  Financial services company Austock, for example, has harnessed UC to close deals faster in its global property portfolio. “Because there is such reliance of the Australian office on the U.S. and the U.S office on

Australia, we’re working very closely every day and we need to know when people are online and when they can be communicated with,” Austock chief information officer Ryan Bessemer was quoted as saying.  The pace at which financial services are integrating communications into business processes has caught the attention of analysts at Frost & Sullivan. The global technology consultancy has recently compiled a report on the trend – and shares some of its key findings in the article. (Overall, Frost & Sullivan research estimates that the potential UC market was $148.1 million last year, a figure expected to grow to $212.1 million by late 2010.)
Frost and Sullivan Australia unified communications research manager, Audrey William, reveals that the “real take-up and growth is being driven by the banking and financial services industries.”

Put simply, “finance is the vertical that really is at the forefront” when it comes to adopting UC and improving employee productivity. She continued: “They’ve gone about trying the very sophisticated applications and integrating presence with telephony.” In line with this trend, many of the financial services companies she has personally interviewed reveal they are planning to invest in unified communications over the next 12 to 18 months.

Not so for all verticals. The public sector, for example, has a ways to go. “At the federal and state government level, we spoke to a lot of CIOs and a lot of them are still on the IP telephony migration path,” she is quoted as saying. “I’d expect that it’ll be between two and three years, or even five years, before companies start to migrate their IP telephony with unified communications.”