Unified Communications as an Opportunity for Carriers in Asia/Pacific

Technology-savvy enterprise IT managers in the Asia/Pacific region will increasingly look at UC technology as a key tool for increasing efficiency and extending capabilities. Trends in convergence are steadily making UC relevant to those adopting, or completing, IP network transformation. The Asia/Pacific region's managed service carriers are beginning to see UC as a key method to staying relevant and responsive to enterprise requirements in the

"x-as-a-service" environment. UC is also seen as an excellent way of expanding the value proposition of hosted services, and indeed leveraging hosting capabilities to extend "big company" managed offerings to SMBs.

However, UC services are far from mature, in the Asia/Pacific region or elsewhere. This naturally creates a marketing challenge of great magnitude for the region's managed service carriers, but it does not mean that they cannot start taking advantage of the applications that exist today, while prepping the region's enterprises for the potential of the

"fully" unified world to come. However, while even global SPs (GSPs) are currently trying to make sense of the implications of deploying UC in a multivendor environment, the particular challenge for carriers in the Asia/Pacific region is in educating enterprises to understand how deep, wide, and broad UC service components can be deployed in their IT environments and business processes, and not simply as yet another tool for managing down telecommunications costs.