Clouds are looming for UC

Until now, Australian organisations haven’t had many offerings to pick from when it came to hosted unified communications. But as Andrew Collins found out, the Australian 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 Office Communications Server (OCS). 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 six 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 IP telephony as a service (ITaaS ) 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 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 says some IT managers simply prefer the strict control that CPE offers.

So the cloud will soon become the dominant delivery mechanism for unified communications. But the cloud is more to service providers than a mere delivery mechanism.

Application onslaught

For some service providers, hosted UC is also a way of becoming a one stop shop for software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. This is thanks, in part, to the inevitability of the cloud to encompass all software.

“All software, in a relatively short space of time, will become available in bite-sized, pay-as-you-go pieces, as a service,” Ovum’s Hodgkinson says. “And that’s definitely true with all the big platforms: SAP, Oracle, anything you want.”

Basically, once a provider establishes a stable data link for your hosted UC system, they’re able to push whatever else they want down the line. Some are using this as an opportunity to deliver additional SaaS applications - for a price, of course.

Telstra once again provides an example. In June the telco launched T-Suite, a group of general business applications hosted on remote servers and delivered to customers through the cloud. The range of included applications is broad, covering CRM, document sharing, remote backup, accounting tools and more.

Hodgkinson explains that there are several companies that specialise in selling bundles of SaaS apps to telcos and service providers, purely for the resale to end users. Telstra uses Jamcracker.com, which has a long list of application partners, including McAfee, Google, Mozy, BlackBerry, Microsoft and many more.

He says more and more UC service providers will offer such hosted applications, based on these middleware suites, alongside their existing hosted communications services.

“T-Suite is the first in Australia but it’s not going to be the only one,” he says. Hodgkinson can’t say for sure when the next one will be revealed, but says, “I wouldn’t be surprised if they follow suit reasonably quickly.”

Early signs indicate that Australian service providers are getting on board: SmartSpeak is already deploying general SaaS applications alongside its hosted UC.

“We have a very strong partnership with RightNow technologies,” Michael Bishop says. “We have a few customers that have taken up a complete cloud solution. That would include the RightNow CRM, which includes things like a customer portal, online chat, incident management, analytics and reporting.”

SmartSpeak plans to expand its range of SaaS applications in the future. The company also has a group of developers that can create interfaces between their hosted UC and other applications; so far they have developed a plug-in for Salesforce.com.

But while more service providers will likely join the party and offer hosted productivity applications, it’s not a trend all providers will be following. Integ, for one, has no plans to offer general SaaS apps.

Simon Rachowski, solutions architect at the company, says that integrated hosted application packages tend to target SMBs. Since Integ targets medium and large enterprises - defined by the company as having 250+ users and more than three sites -  they have no interest in such packages.

Medium and large organisations typically already have solutions in place for the problems the integrated packs address. So, Rachowski says, Integ instead has developers on hand to integrate the provider’s communications services into existing solutions.

For example, if a client uses Microsoft Outlook, Integ can incorporate scheduling capabilities for its videoconferencing service into Outlook’s calendar. Or it can integrate the conferencing solution with the customer’s back-end authentication servers, to ease the process of establishing a conference via the web.