Embrace API development to boost UC: Tata Communications

By Gabey Goh February 12, 2014

The case for UC&C

While the opening up of the UCaaS market is expected to lower the barriers for SMEs to leverage on such tools for their business, it remains a slightly different ball game for large enterprises.

Tata Communication’s Bartolo (pic) said that while there are many free tools and apps available, collaboration isn’t as simple as deploying an app on the employees’ desktops or smartphones.

“Ideally, enterprises need to consider how they are going to make information assets discoverable. While there are many popular free apps available, simple aspects such as search, for example, are underrated components of collaboration.

“If a company wants to help employees locate information more rapidly to make sales activities more effective, targeted and productive, it will need to formulate and enforce policies for metadata – the tags that allow documents, messages, images and other forms of unstructured data to be discovered and used. The results shouldn’t be underestimated,” he said.

Bartolo said that developing collaboration platforms involves making the right data available to employees, in the right context, at the right time. Embedding collaborative tools within frequently used workflow applications may well require those applications to be redesigned.

“Increasingly, IT professionals need to become accustomed to demands of this kind. Collaboration enables the creation of value from data – not just among C-level executives, but also right across the organisation.

“IT is pivotal to delivering on the promise of the company as a storehouse of know-how, enjoying a competitive advantage against the broader market on the basis of employees’ willingness and ability to share,” he added.

Bartolo said that companies needed to balance their outbound agility by focusing on the need to boost collaboration within the enterprise. By doing so, enterprises will generate their own “social dividend." The future of internal collaboration is a natural evolution of the social and mobile trends that have shaped business over the past few years.

“Additionally, it is important to recognise that improving collaboration isn’t merely about deploying an application; it involves important decisions about culture, organisation and infrastructure. There are risks to be managed,” he said.

These risks for enterprises, according to Bartolo, include:

The need to secure intellectual property;

The need to protect brand reputation (if it’s on an external platform);

Potentially negative productivity effects from poorly designed collaborative tools;

The risk of poor quality employee-generated content; and

The need for enterprise-wide social media literacy.

“Seamless collaboration doesn’t just descend on desktops, tablets and smartphones, fully formed and ready for action. Enterprises need to chart out policies around collaboration that promote and foster information- and knowledge-sharing,” he said.

Tata opens up with APIs, SIP Connect

Tata Communications is determined to capitalise on the positive demand for UC&C solutions, and Bartolo claimed that the company is “widely perceived to be an expert” in the Asia Pacific video collaboration service market.

Key to the increased adoption and better usage of UC tools is the use of open APIs (application programming interfaces, which increases flexibility and interoperability to address enterprise challenges, he said.

“If CIOs and CTOs embrace the power of APIs, they could potentially open up the company’s ecosystem to untapped crucial resources, with the ability to scale the business quite cost-effectively – all while saving precious time.

“While traditional business partnerships, joint ventures and product integrations are costly and complex to maintain, APIs have known to bring ‘nearly effortless, asymmetric scale’,” he claimed.

Bartolo said that next-generation collaboration tools that extend seamlessly across the enterprise and beyond are a natural extension of mobile and social trends in consumer markets. If enterprises can deploy tools of this kind to liberate information workers, the potential for productivity gains are substantial.

“Because of their accessibility, enterprises can customise the API-based tools they build. This will allow enterprises to design and refine social tools until they are a perfect fit for the enterprise business processes and IT architecture and their employees, thereby maximising participation and productivity gains as workforces become geographically disparate and as businesses look to expand their customer and partner base into new markets,” he said.

To illustrate, Bartolo pointed to WebRTC, an emerging open source technology platform that embeds real-time voice, text and video communications capabilities within web browsers.

He said that because WebRTC is browser-based, it also opens the door to collaboration where it’s needed: not within yet another stand-alone application, but within the browser, where most of us do most of our work.

“Open APIs available with WebRTC can enable the ultimate aim of enterprise social networking development efforts: A fusion of mobile, social, gamification and video into a single collaboration platform for end-users.

“They have disruptive potential as a platform for enterprise collaboration, one that integrates text, audio and video interaction in a way that’s highly customisable, and which integrates tightly with existing workflows,” he added.

In line with this trend toward better interoperability, the company recently expanded its UC portfolio with the launch of Global SIP Connect.

This latest upgrade enables the replacement of legacy trunking services with the latest in SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) based public switched telephone network (PSTN) access, including compatibility with the Microsoft Lync unified communications platform.

“Enterprise customers will now be able to aggregate voice traffic using Tata Communications’ network. This not only reduces complexity but also brings significant cost and infrastructure savings,” Bartolo claimed.

Tata Communications also launched its mobile VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) platform, a hosted white label solution that allows mobile network operators (MNOs) and other retail voice providers to deliver and monetise innovative converged IP communication services.

The company claims the mobile VoIP platform can give MNOs the ability to offer customers a simple, converged communication service across voice, chat, video and file sharing, enhancing the customer relationship value chain and thereby improving customer loyalty and Average Revenue Per User (ARPU).

“APIs may prove to be the missing link that allows developers of enterprise social networks to focus upon what really matters: Building collaborative tools.

"These could have the potential to relentlessly pull new users into their orbit, extending the reach of enterprise collaboration inside enterprises and between organisations substantially,” said Bartolo.

He added that the increase of SIP connectivity and open API-based collaboration tools are the key to seamless collaboration for enterprises.

They are expected to gain visibility as they essentially bring video, text and audio to the browser, offering a simpler, faster and more flexible way for businesses to work together, thus enabling seamless collaboration and ultimately leading to "liberated employees."

“Like a startup, IT departments developing collaboration tools for the enterprise need to launch minimum viable products – and watch to see what works and what doesn’t. Increasingly, the reduced costs associated with API-based development will allow enterprises to work this way,” said Bartolo.