Enabling Mobile UC

The Middle East market is ripe for mobile unified communications due to high mobile penetration rates, writes Piers Ford

Published Sunday, 27 May 2012
By Piers Ford

The Middle East market is ripe for mobile unified communications due to high mobile penetration rates, writes Piers Ford

Despite the rapid consumer adoption of mobile technology across the Middle East, the integrated business use of tablets and smartphones has been stubbornly slow to follow. Users might be clamouring to use their devices to access corporate  IT systems and multimedia applications but network managers are still hampered in their efforts to provide this degree of connectivity by some familiar obstacles – including that perennial thorn-in-the-side, quality of service, not to mention security concerns.

However, there are signs that increasingly, mobile Unified Communications (UC) is enabling a new level of accessibility that will give remote and roaming users genuine flexibility.

“Guaranteeing Quality of Service has been one of the major hurdles to the adoption of mobile UC,” agrees Wael Abdulal, collaboration manager at Cisco UAE, one of the big vendors with a keen eye on this emerging market. “Users want simplicity and want things to work regardless of the device they are using, the network they are connected to or their location.”

Abdulal offers mobile video as a key example of an application primed to take advantage of mobile UC but currently restricted by the jitter and delays symptomatic of an unreliable Quality of Service, and the limitations of point-to-point or user-to-user only services.

“The first issue is being more and more addressed by business and service providers,” he says, “and the second has been addressed by vendors and it is becoming easy to initiate multi-party voice/HD video calls from mobile devices.”

He testifies to the power of mobile video. “From my personal experience, the killer application is when I was able to join telepresence sessions from my Cisco Cius and iPad,” says Abdulal. “As an active participant in voice, video and data sharing, I was able to see all participants as active users and silent ones, and my face captured by the tiny camera was displayed on a 65-inch screen. The interesting part of this experience is that I made the call from my living room at home. This is the flexibility mobile UC brings and it is important to have this experience from any device.”

Increasing productivity
Abdulal is convinced that the high penetration of mobile in the Middle East makes the market ripe for mobile UC.

“As businesses start looking for ways to improve staff productivity and cut down on travel expenses, they are turning to solutions and technologies like mobile UC, as they can do more with less. With mobile UC, employees can be connected and engaged from any device and location, and this helps to improve productivity. We are seeing a good uptake from all sectors but noticeably among service providers, healthcare and education, where we see good, strong demand.”

Products like Cisco’s Jabber and Cius applications, Avaya’s Flare and Alcatel-Lucent’s My IC Mobile, are competing for the attention of network managers who are looking for ways to enable staff to connect with their business via Macs, iPhones, tablets, Blackberries, Androids and other smartphones.

At Avaya, Nidal Abou-Latif, vice president, emerging markets, would add the hospitality, and oil and gas industries, to the list of sectors looking to capitalise on the benefits of an integrated mobile workforce.

Avaya supplied one of the region’s earliest successful mobile UC systems for the Atlantis resort in Palm Jumeirah, where staff use Nokia handsets to stay in touch with core voice and data systems, and automatically switch between the Wi-Fi and local GSM networks according to the most economical connection.

“Smartphones, tablet PCs and other personal communication tools are making their way into the workplace,” says Abou-Latif. “In fact, many employers are providing staff with a stipend and telling them to bring their own device. It’s a development that’s getting a lot of attention these days, with good cause. Increasingly, employees want the convenience of a single device that meets both their business and personal needs – and they know what they like. It’s clear they prefer the latest gadget they’ve selected on their own.”

Improving bandwidth
Abou-Latif says the telecom industry has worked hard to improve bandwidth scales using 3G and 4G technologies, and that improvements in infrastructure across the region mean that more competitive data usage packages are available as a result.

However, consistency remains an issue for many industry players. KS Parag, managing director at conferencing service provider FVC, says local ISPs need to ensure the availability of bandwidth from at least 384kbps up to 512kbs. He also suggests that the market needs to develop solutions more specifically tailored to the needs of different sectors.

“The mobile UC market is only just beginning to take off largely because of the increasing adoption of tablets within the enterprise,” he says. “In a market that is largely fluid and mobile, we are seeing great adoption of these technologies in the education sector, and in medium-to-large enterprises with satellite offices – particularly those in the finance and energy sectors. While still at quite an early stage, UAE businesses are embracing mobile unified communications, followed by businesses in Saudi and Qatar.”

Cross-application, service and device integration remains the greatest challenge to effective mobile UC implementation, according to Roch Muraine, director, strategic solutions for the Middle East and Africa at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. While open standards like SIP have helped to transform the user experience in terms of interaction between applications, network managers still need to profile their users adequately and establish comprehensive mobile security strategies.

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“Mobile UC is just the visible part of the communication revolution in the making, because it allows you to provide rich services within limited bandwidth,” says Muraine. “The complexity remains in the interaction between the different services, media [text, rich text, voice, video, data sharing], equipment and type of interaction.”

And the bigger the organisation, the greater the challenge.  The flood of mobile platforms and applications might be opening up opportunities for flexible connectivity, but the impact on the network needs careful management.

“Managing different platforms to achieve a successful mobile UC deployment on a large scale is a nightmare for the IT operation, which can lead to the creation of small pockets of business-centric UC only,” warns Farhat Khan, project manager at Optimus, which sells Avaya-based systems in the region.

“Along with the introduction of IP telephony, telecoms are already being handled largely by IT. And there is demand for more resilience to support the voice network, as it has a direct impact on customer service. Video, in particular, needs more integration with the voice platform.”

Some of these aspects are being addressed by the industry as a matter of urgency. For example, says Alcatel-Lucent’s Muraine, as mobile operators deploy LTE [the high-speed wireless data standard], allowing for better bandwidth at an acceptable price, services such as mobile video, mobile UC and tablet-style whiteboard applications will boom.

“The openness of the applications and standard interfaces like those offered by Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise’s My IC Mobile is also important for a better customer experience, which allows the user to switch to ‘corporate’ communications and navigate from one usage to another with one click; escalating a chat communication to a voice or video communication will boost the adoption of UC on the move,” he suggests.

At LifeSize Communications, which specialises in mobile video conferencing systems and services, regional manager Pradeep Angeveetil says the variable quality of 3G in different countries across the Gulf region does still impact on mobile users.

“However, improving interoperability between platforms and solutions, plus widespread WiFi usage does alleviate potential adoption issues,” he adds.

“We are constantly ensuring that both interoperability and bandwidth are optimised, and these have been the two key drivers at LifeSize. For example, one of our installations for a large service provider in the region consists of our ClearSea solution and LifeSize Codecs that interoperate with Microsoft Lync. This really demonstrates the benefits of mobile UC: a Lync user can seamlessly call a LifeSize unit in a boardroom or elsewhere, and be part of a multi-party call.”

Infrastructure issues
For network managers, the danger lies in applying mobile UC as a blanket solution without addressing any underlying weaknesses in their infrastructure. If the bring-your-own-device culture continues to thrive, they need to ensure that the smartphones and tablets their users are connecting to the network have all the necessary security features in place. And network management and monitoring will only become more important in guaranteeing quality of service for real-time voice and video communications.

According to KS Parag at FVC, network professionals who want to champion the cause of mobile UC in their businesse need to satisfy three important criteria:  better bandwidth for connectivity to the mobile devices, especially if the network is using VPN to communicate; make it as easy as possible to access, operate and launch a call; and provide a virtual capability for people to meet in a multipoint environment, which mixes mobile and static points.

“The killer app will give a senior executive the ability to start a multi-point video call along with the ability to share data with his colleagues at the touch of a button,” says Parag.

“It is very important that network professionals focus on properly connecting their organisation with the right tools and solutions, so their employees have the right access at all times,” says Avaya’s Abou-Ltaif. “Avaya understands that no two mobile workers are exactly alike, and the needs of any individual will change based on where and what work needs to be done. Whether teleworking from home or a partner’s office, roaming the campus, travelling or hot-desking at headquarters, you need a system that will support different people, with different needs and different roles.”