The big IT buzz of 2007 is Unified Communications (UC), India included. But this buzz is yet to translate into something concrete on the ground. “The customer adoption of UC is not significant enough, and we don’t see the market taking off this year,” said Alok Shende, Director, Technology Practice, Frost & Sullivan, India.

The research and consulting firm did some case studies on UC and discovered that there was not a single customer in the country which had carried out an end-to-end deployment of UC. Shende said that the real challenges in the adoption are related to technology integration, inter-operability, and identification of voice-enabled processes within the enterprise. “The return on investment for enterprises would be on voice-enabled processes,” he noted.

UC goes beyond the unified mailbox, with global trends showing that it will be embedded in a variety of other applications from wikis to blogs to podcasts, plus a wide range of business applications.

In the last few months vendors like Microsoft, Nortel, Google, Cisco, IBM and Avaya are trying to capture a large share of this emerging market. They are announcing products which provide solution integration and extend beyond traditional enterprise telephony infrastructure.

“Having a common converged infrastructure is the base for building UC. Also, the solutions should be built on open source stacks,” says Minhaj Zia, Business Development Manager, Unified Communications, India and Saarc, Cisco. He adds that enterprises need to have a strategy over 3-5 years for UC.

According to a Forrester survey, firms say that critical business processes halt completely one-quarter of the time when key decision-makers are out of communication.

“We are embedding telephony in applications like mail box so that issues like non-availability of key decision makers are mitigated,” said Sukhvinder Ahuja, Microsoft Business Leader, India, Nortel. Thus, a customer using Microsoft’s Live Communications Server can integrate the applications on Nortel’s telephone device.

Nortel has deployed UC for Shell and International SOS, a provider of medical assistance and services. In India, it has rolled out a couple of pilot projects that would be over in another month’s time. Nortel however refused to name the companies doing the pilots.

UC vendors fall into three distinct categories: data vendors, voice communication vendors and application vendors. Each of them is trying to define their offerings keeping compatibility in mind.

However, Shende said that vendors should provide a comfort level in terms of defining the workflow to be built around UC. “The real development will happen when players like Microsoft and IBM have a clear stance from a technology and alliance perspective.”