Opportunities and Risks (Market Trends, Competition, etc)

* Opportunities: The UC market is growing despite the global market recession, infact this recession increases the value that qualified resellers (Ideally Microsoft recognised Voice Enabled) and Microsoft can bring with UC deployments in particular the following customer revenue generating demands can be addressed:
o Drive down the cost of audio traffic taking traffic from PSTN to VoIP
o Reduce the amount of time staff spend travelling and the cost of travel by implementing video conferencing and audio conferencing facilities
o Increase the efficient use of existing network resources providing more productivity with a reduced hardware spend.
o By staged deployment and integration our UC deployments offer investment protection of legacy equipment and allowing the customer to stage their UC roll out in a scaleble manner.
* Market trends: Frost & Sullivan anticipates a growth explosion (30% plus growth rates for the next two years) in the medium term beyond which the market growth rates will stabilize at 22% until 2015 in the Middle East region. The widespread availability of broadband networks at cheaper rates will also fuel growth. A recent report also anticipates that usage in the corporate segment will grow at a CAGR of 18.6% as against the CAGR of 21.7% in the education vertical and 21.6% in healthcare. This is particularly reflected in increased government spending in the region in these areas.
* Key competitors to Microsoft such as Avaya, Cisco and even IBM will fight defensively to protect their customer base and market percentage ownership, however companies who have a high dependency on hardware sales become constricted to demand higher software license prices from their customers. Through Microsoft solutions and skillful partner availability the Microsoft UC proposition should be considered compelling.
* AS we operate in the UC sector a risk is also an opportunity. The real risk is an unplanned deployment leading to a very negative customer experience and damage to the vendors UC brand
* Organizations going in for UC must plan their networking infrastructure with care or it would slowly lead to network disruption. Hence, while it enhances business processes, it can also overwhelm networks when application performance is not closely monitored.
* UC requires a significantly higher quality of service and real-time performance requirements from the underlying network, particularly when it comes to audio and video transport, than data or even voice.
* This technology presents new opportunities for organizations, making it easier to stay in touch with coworkers, customers, vendors, and others. Unfortunately, this convenience and integration also present new opportunities for attackers, providing them with additional points of attack and the ability to spread those attackers further. Being a technology that spans the entire stack—from applications to network, IT heads need to be careful while thinking out their UC security. Existing security mechanisms for data networks will not suffice.
* In their enthusiasm and eagerness to reap the benefits of UC, some companies are not stopping to consider the security ramifications of a UC deployment. Awareness of the threats and a plan for addressing them can make the difference between a successful transition to UC—and one that creates more problems than it solves.