BANGALORE, INDIA: Unified communication aims to bring about a sea change in the way businesses - from SMBs to the enterprise - communicate and collaborate.  It is an emerging class of application and services designed to improve communications within the modern organization, to keep workgroups connected and enable them to collaborate effectively, and streamline business processes.

According to a forecast from Frost & Sullivan on UC in India, the total market size of UC is approx $670M in 2008 which is likely to grow to more than $1B by 2010. Cisco Systems Inc, a leading vendor of UC solns is all set to tap the fast emerging UC market with its own strategy to address the SMB market needs. In an interview with CIOL, Minhaj Zia, national sales manager, Unified Communications, Cisco India & SAARC talks of the market trends in India, advantages of adopting UC solns and Cisco's strategy.

Excerpts:

CIOL: How has 2008 been to Cisco in selling Unified Communications? What is the share of SMBs in it?

Minhaj Zia: 2008 has been a phenomenal year for Cisco in selling Unified Communications solutions. Cisco's core business is enabling an IP based network platform. Because it is the no. 1 company in this market and IP enables the ability to converge data, voice, video and mobility (which are the key components of UC). Cisco is well positioned to drive the UC platform in the market over the next few years.

Cisco has attained leadership position in IP telephony with a market share of 34.4 percent and the latest Frost & Sullivan's report on "Asia Pacific Enterprise Telephony Markets 2008" and substantiated the position.

CIOL: What has been Cisco's focus while selling UC products? What edge does Cisco products provide?

MZ: Cisco is aggressively tapping industry verticals such as banking, retail, healthcare, and manufacturing apart from the IT sector, which has been one of the early adopters of UC. Cisco leverages its networking expertise to combine UC solutions along with wireless and security applications for enhanced productivity and business benefits. Cisco's technology vision is to make network as the platform for effective business collaboration and rich end user experience by embedding intelligent applications and information systems into the network itself.

With approximately 50-60 per cent of IT spend in the country expected to come from the flourishing SMB segment by 2008 (Source: NASSCOM), it is clear that there is a huge market waiting out there to be tapped and companies are focused on addressing it. However, in order to effectively tap this segment, it is important that vendors develop customized solutions, which offer a cost-effective and easy to deploy alternative.

SMB is the fastest growing segment for Cisco in India and worldwide. We recently unveiled a multi-pronged strategic roadmap to tap the rapidly growing market for IT and networking of SMBs in India. The strategy includes focusing on new customized SMB products/solutions and financing schemes like the recently launched Easy Lease program for SMBs.

CIOL: What are the key factors driving SMBs to adopt Unified Communications?

MZ: Companies have to change the way they communicate and collaborate both within their company, with their customers and partners. Unified communications enables both in terms of communication and collaboration. That is why UC is considered critical to the success of companies just like e-business became critical for the success of companies in the 1990s.

As UC applications become more prevalent in the extended workspace, more organizations are also realizing the associated benefits. And in today's dynamic business environment, perhaps the most important benefit comes from having a communications system that can change and grow at a moment's notice, enabling new capabilities for more effective business communications, employee mobility, streamlining business processes, and improving profitability.

CIOL: How is Cisco helping enterprises address security issues while adopting UC?

MZ: Security for Cisco Unified Communications is a natural extension of the Cisco Self-Defending Network, which identifies, prevents, and adapts to threats from both internal and external sources. Only Cisco offers a comprehensive systems approach to security for unified communications by protecting all levels of a UC system: the infrastructure, call management, endpoints, and applications.

Cisco Unified Communications solutions offer integrated security features such as encryption to prevent eavesdropping, secure messaging to protect who can access and receive messages, phone authentication to protect against unauthorized handsets connecting to the network, and call-control security to ensure phone service is not disrupted by malicious activity.

Cisco Self-Defending Network security solutions enhance unified communications security by providing a secure network platform upon which Voice over IP (VoIP) is deployed. Granular voice-traffic validation and inspection performed by firewall functions in Cisco routers and the Cisco ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliance ensure traffic that purports to be voice actually is voice — and that it is abiding by company security policy. Cisco Intrusion Prevention solutions provide an added layer of security by stopping hacking and virus and worm attacks before they even reach the VoIP infrastructure.