By Jagdish Hathiramani
Although 'massive cost reductions' are proven outcomes of employing Unified Communications (UC) platforms within global companies like Virtusa, restrictions from a lack of available technology in Sri Lanka has limited the wider adoption of converged communications, such as interoperability and video and teleconferencing. Telepresence (the use of technology to allow a person to feel that they were present in a location other than their true location / a heightened form of video conferencing), in particular, has suffered from being prohibitively expensive in the Sri Lankan context because of the relatively high cost of bandwidth, which is cheaper in the U.S., Europe and even India.
These comments were made by Niranjan Seevaratnam, Associate Director of Information Technology, Virtusa, speaking at a panel discussion held as part of 'Unified Communications - Sri Lanka 2008', an event organised by business consultants Frost & Sullivan and held on Wednesday in Colombo.
He added that, as a global company, Virtusa was driven to use UC because of several factors such as potential cost savings, improved speed of communications and a reduced carbon footprint. However, if Sri Lanka could overcome restrictions such as those to bandwidth, number portability, etc., the promise of UC and its 'Conferencing and Collaboration, Presence and Mobility' capabilities could be better utilised by local businesses as well. Panelist Vidhura Ralapanawe, Manager - Sustainability & Communications, MAS Intimates, noted that another advantage of UC was its 'inherent greenness' as witnessed by the mobility of his colleagues now using laptops who otherwise would be burdened with the additional costs and possible future environmental repercussions associated with installing hundreds of metres of networking and electrical cables.
According to panelist Binzad Aliar, Channel Sales Manager for contact centre specialist Aspect, the utilisation of UC platforms to simplify and speed up the ability of call centre operatives to add experts from different areas within, for example, the Financial Services field into an existing conversation allows for improved 'first call resolution', a factor that could drive call centre revenues up by as much as 20-30%.
According to a Frost & Sullivan statement, key decision makers, namely CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, COOs, as well as Vice Presidents, Directors, General Managers, Heads, Senior Managers and Managers from relevant departments such as Information Technology, Operations, Systems, Planning and Implementation Corporate Strategy, Process Control and Management, Process Optimization, Customer Relation and Satisfaction, Internal Audit, Networks, Supply Chain, logistics, etc. were part of this evening gathering.l |
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