When heavy rains lashed Mumbai on July 14 this year, a thought raced through the mind of Gopal Redkar, a senior sales manager working in one of India’s top five software services firms. Last year, during the same period, Redkar lost out on a potential big sales deal. The reason—crucial inputs from experts, required for responding to a Request for Proposal (RFP), were delayed since the experts were held up in traffic due to the heavy rains.

However, unlike last year, Redkar today has a self-assured smile running across his lips. The reason behind Redkar’s confidence—a Unified Communications (UC) system that has transformed the way his function works. With Redkar’s IT team having unified traditional phones, IP phones, e-mail and Instant Messaging (IM) systems, the team can contact domain experts, wherever they are located, by using any device.

Today, even if he is stuck in traffic, Redkar remains unruffled. He pulls out his smartphone from his pocket and quickly checks if the domain experts are available online. He discovers that the healthcare domain expert, whom he was counting on for putting together the proposal, has an out-of-office status. Using the same smartphone, Redkar immediately queries the HR database of his company, to check for similar domain experts. On finding one expert who is online but in a different time zone, Redkar contacts him via chat.

Having received confirmation of the expert’s availability, Redkar proceeds to share his proposal with him. The proposal is also being simultaneously viewed by his other colleagues scattered in different locations, using their smartphones or laptops. What follows is a collaborative interaction, where the expert guides the team and points out changes using a whiteboard. This allows each member to highlight changes in the proposal, and make instant modifications. The whole interaction is wrapped up in a couple of hours.

A year ago, without the UC system, Redkar would have probably exchanged numerous e-mails, spent more than a week to locate the right domain expert, and then probably another week to actually contact him. Today, everyone in the ecosystem is a click or call away. Welcome to the new world of UC, where functions are independent of devices and everyone is accessible. UC has a strong impact in a global context, since organizations can unite people across different time zones, and crunch timelines by a huge percentage. The result—a significant boost in productivity and efficiency.