From emerging opportunities to factors driving the growth and adoption of unified communications, Minhaj Zia, Managing Director, Polycom India & SAARC brings us his views from the Indian subcontinent.
If you look at India as a market, there are various customer segments when it comes to video and UC. Some of them are really advanced technology adopters while some are lagging or not yet aware of its impact on workforce productivity. The primary focus for most customers today is increasing the productivity of their workforce to reduce costs and enable their people to come together as dynamic teams, no matter where they are located. When I talk about early adopters of technology, there are three influential factors I refer to specifically when it comes to video collaboration:

IT services in India. This segment is growing very fast on an average of 15 percent year on year. It is worth almost USD $100 billion worth of exports collectively, employing close to 3.2 million people directly, and indirectly employing almost twice that number. That's a large workforce of knowledge workers which serves not just the Indian market but globally too with huge numbers of customers in North America, Europe, Australia and even China. Their profitability is really dependent on workforce productivity, because their business is people – delivery teams who are typically based in India, and sales teams based out of other geographies – who are serving customers globally. Video collaboration enables employees to build trust among each other, save time in coordination of activities, and helps ensure projects are delivered to customers on time.

Government. India is a very large country and it is impossible for its administrators (ministers, government employees, and bureaucrats) to offer citizen services and coordinate projects down to a village level. The patience of citizens is also not what it used to be; in the internet age when citizens can get instant gratification from private sector services, they expect the same level of service from government departments as well. The easiest way to provide this is with video, as other technologies are not as effective in making such timely collaboration possible. There is also a lot of money being invested in theDigital India project, an ambitious programme to digitise and automate entire processes of governance.

The proliferation of network in India. Previously the availability of networks was weak in certain rural areas and even in some urban areas. With huge growth in telecom and mobile data that continues very rapidly, Indian customers are now able to adopt video technology more easily.

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