By Tabrez Khan
Next on Cisco’s agenda is the recently launched Hosted Collaboration Solution. The networking vendor is on a look out for service providers for its hosted unified communications (UC) model.
“Service providers are the preferred channel for enterprises to procure UC and collaboration services regardless of deployment model,” said B Raghavendran, VP, Channel Operations and Commercial Strategy, Cisco India and Saarc.
According to him, the hosted model of UC is growing twice as fast as the on-premise model. “When evaluating hosted UC and collaboration offerings, enterprises with more than 1,000 employees prioritize core attributes like scalability and business process integration. The hosted model of our collaboration solution offers these with unprecedented flexibility.”
Quoting Frost & Sullivan study Raghavendran said, “India leads the Saarc region’s UC market in terms of total spending. The projected CAGR of UC solutions from 2008 to 2015 is 7.9 percent. With continued adoption by several key verticals such as BFSI, IT-ITES, etc, the Indian market is anticipated to emerge as a strong market for UC vendors.”
According to him, apart from regular deployments across early-adopting verticals, opportunities for UC vendors exist in new businesses using mobility, such as virtual manufacturing, virtual meetings and virtual logistics, or new modes of operations such as office-less business. Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Solution gives partners, including service providers and integrators, the ability to deploy multiple collaboration applications on one server in a virtualized environment and then host those applications for multiple client organizations. The solution is designed to be run from partner data centers.
Raghavendran informed that the licensing model of hosted model will be consistent with that of on-premise deployments. “The solution is modular and can offer applications based on customer needs and will be priced accordingly.” |