AGC Networks Executive Vice President of Global Sales and Business Operations Sanjeev Verma in an interview with Prithwi Raj Sinha says that not only the government, but also the private sector should be proactively involved in spreading unified communication tools for better citizen services and collaboration.

Excerpts:

What is ‘Unified Communication’ and does the Indian government have sufficient awareness of its benefits?
Unified Communication (UC) is a collaborative tool, which can help the government in not only connecting various government bodies, but also for closer and secured administration. The concept is over a decade old and has been very well adopted by Western governance bodies. In India, too, the government is making investments in sectors like medicine, education, police, and military. Even various ministries and states are taking advantage of Unified Communication’s capabilities.

Unfortunately though, the awareness of UC is not even /equal within various government bodies. Today on one hand we have high value purchase entities / influencers e.g. NISG, NIC and certain PSUs (ONGC, SAIL, Coal India, Indian Oil etc) who have a fair idea on how UC facilitates management. On other hand we have state level government bodies that are yet to be updated on basic functionalities so that they can gauge benefits and plan to reap them as well.

What, in your opinion, are key reasons behind this gap in awareness?
Not all can be blamed on the government bodies alone; a lot has to be done by the industry too. For example, today the UC battle is primarily an OEM/ISV domain as propagated by various analysts.  There is no standard definition or compliance list for UC, which means Cisco can define and package it differently, as compared to an AVAYA or Siemens. Similarly IBM defines UC differently than Microsoft.

Hence the understanding of the government sector (and enterprise customers as well) about UC is very much driven by the core players within the UC domain. My personal observation is that while there is an ongoing OEMs/ISVs battle with regard to their respective portfolios, there is a dire need to create an experience of UC (product and platform agnostic) both from the customers’ collaboration requirement perspective and from a day-to-day collaboration perspective.

What are some of the platforms that the government is opting for, and what measures are you taking on this front?
A classic example is of the Gujarat state government. The government has set an example with the Chief Minister using video and audio conferencing as a tool to stay connected with every state government body. This has helped the government to be easily available and responsive to the needs of citizens. Also, as far as the State’s reach is concerned, every IT expansion initiative of the government is not merely to connect villages, like it is with building roads. They are working on building networks that are capable of delivering UC benefits to every citizen across India. Projects like State-wide area networks (SWAN) are being set up with the help of private partners. The building of Wide Area Network (WAN) across selected states will create an infrastructure capable of delivering voice as well as data solutions.

On the investment front governments initiatives are focusing on building a national knowledge network, connecting panchayats, creating e-Governance facilities and software, as well as UID (unique identification) number and GIS (geospatial information system) applications. If we put all this together, we are looking at an investment of about $20 billion over the next five years on IT infrastructure. Here if we compare 2011 with 2012, the government is expected to spend about $79.8 billion in 2012, an increase of 9.1% from 2011 on IT infrastructure.

It appears that there are various opportunities that exist in the government sphere for UC service providers. What is your strategy to tap this huge market and stay ahead of competitors?
We know that UC delivers much more than just the creation of a collaborative platform to seamlessly deliver information in various formats. It is expected to become a part of our lives the way wireless telephony has. We can assist the government in converting this into reality today. With this belief at the core of everything we conceptualise, we plan to sell UC as an experience and not solution – an experience that is customisable as per the customer’s requirement and expectations. Thus, to stay ahead we have to stay different and that is the strategy AGC will adopt.  We are working to create our own distinctive UC storyline so that we do not become just another UC player.

Would you like to share with us some of the specifics of this strategy?
Firstly, rationally analyse the target customer segments within Government and Enterprise and their day to day as well as potential usage scenarios. Secondly, find relevant solution modules that cater to these users’ necessity, relevance and experience requirement. Thirdly, give specific attention to demographics and mobility based unified communication (especially when 3G is here in India). Fourthly, keep a tab on disruptive technology (that can have UC lineage and extension) and experiences being visible in the market every now and then so as to incorporate them into the solution. These are highly flexible and feature rich support to government, to help manage not only metro cities but also forests. These solutions can assist in connecting with peers, with the highest level of built-in security and feature rich interactivity options. Further, to take our service portfolio to respective government representative we have built a strong, experienced team to cater exclusively to the government’s requirement.

What are the key drivers that you feel will increase the adoption of unified communication in the government sector?
Government employees share information, collaborate at a faster pace and have needs for more data and information than ever before. But the government is also faced with increasing costs associated with the need for infrastructure to support collaboration and communication. Key government initiatives such as tele-work, business continuity, compliance, and increased calls for government transparency and accountability are bringing greater scrutiny to bear on budgets. They are forcing State agencies to find more efficient and flexible ways to communicate and collaborate while saving money.

UC is being viewed as the new paradigm for employee communications as it allows employees to reach each other faster and in real time, transcending device barriers.

The value proposition of UC is multifaceted. It is one of the few technology initiatives that can help organisations lower the overall IT costs while improving user productivity. Specifically, UC can also lower the cost of government communications, improve worker productivity through advanced collaboration tools, create new communications-enabled business processes and improve customer satisfaction.
 
What are some of the UC applications that you see the government adopting in the next few years?
The government as well as other enterprises will adopt a few (if not all) of the following UC applications:
•  Productive collaboration anytime, anywhere
•  Persistent context relevant to every task and situation
•  Accelerating business processes and applications
•  Seamless across multi-vendor devices and networks
•  Responsive mixed-media social experiences
•  Mission critical real-time performance
The government would like to deploy these UC Applications – with Lower TCO – eliminating complexity, leveraging the investments and incremental “self-funded” ROI.

What are some of the interventions you feel that service providers should be able to make to facilitate this?
The key question here is: when will they do it? This is where I feel that once we, as service providers need to:
• Educate and spoil them with our “Experience” storyline tag with live practical demonstrations of experience.
• Align with analysts and get them to endorse our approach.
• Create enough awareness through campaigns and build excitement around our own story line.
• Popularise such tools with identified champions, with natural demographic attractiveness and propensity to take up the cause, and popularise the same internally. 
Once this is done, I am sure even they will agree that Visual Collaboration technologies are best enablers in this tough economic scenario, not only as a means of business continuity but also for containing costs. Governments need these tools as much as any enterprise today. Governments too, like companies, need to test policies and campaigns with their target audience and what better than UC to get closer to the target audience and get valuable feedback faster than before? In addition with UC they can even can boost productivity and enable the party/ government body to stay on top of trends and rapidly changing business conditions.

Governments are looking for voice messaging, wireless communications, conferencing, interactive voice response, and call distribution. What unified platforms do you provide to cater to this?
Today even governments face tight budget situations, thus sometimes affecting the adoption of new technologies, which is done only when they feel it is absolutely needed. Still, there is more demand than ever before for tightened security, improved collaboration, intelligence sharing and reliable services. AGC as a leading Solutions Integrator fulfills requirement at the right pace and cost. Today we have partnered with leading names like Aspect, AVAYA, Cisco, etc. to cater to such requirements.

We are also continuously working on preparing these platforms for forthcoming technologies. For example, today we may not be having contact centers equipped with a 3G-based ingress point. But the way technology adoption is being witnessed in India we may soon need them. Soon we will also see shift away from just desk-to-desk video collaboration or Kiosk-based Video Call solutions). AGC, with its large partner network, can leverage one partner platform to develop such capabilities and then integrate them with mainstream platforms from other partners to deliver a comprehensive experiential solution.

What benefits will the governments see if they deploy your collaboration tools?
Unified Communications is about people, processes and customers working together, optimally, in an open environment where there are no boundaries. It is really not about technology – technology is just an enabler. But technology also needs to deliver tangible benefits to create demand for self. UC requires being a part of the existing work environment to deliver what is expected.

The Indian government can easily be called the largest enterprise in India with the widest network. And thus, their collaboration needs are higher than anyone else’s. For example, today we have huge investments in Chandipore, Orissa to launch satellites – a very crucial operation for the government. To maximise benefits, the government needs to have this connected with the state government, central government, and certain key organisations in India and abroad as well. All these locations should be able to collaborate in real time and the loss of even a second can be the loss of millions of rupees.

Once UC becomes an integrated part of a system, it helps optimise productivity at minutely-increased cost. These tangible benefits make UC a key solution to be integrated in the existing network of every government body.