Eric Lauzon, CIO, Nortel Asia
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| Tools such as virtualization, video conferencing and telepresence technologies will gain popularity in 2009. | ||
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Q: What was the biggest thing that affected your company this year?
The global economic downturn is clearly having a profound effect on our industry in 2008 and 2009. But adversity also brings with it opportunities, and we are working with our customers to identify how technology can help them through the current economic malaise.
Companies will be looking at cost savings in all areas of operations. Within Nortel's operations, we have eliminated most travel for anything but customer-related activities.
Is the news about the recession next year going to affect you, or do you expect it to be business as usual?
We’re confident that 2009 will see more companies adopting unified communications (UC), especially as a reduction in business travel and operating costs drive IT to look into Green IT and technologies that improve productivity and efficiency savings. As such, tools such as virtualization, video conferencing and telepresence technologies will gain popularity.
We also think companies will look towards hosted UC services to reduce costs and maximize resources. Last year, UC services accounted for about US$2.6 billion in the Asia-Pacific market, according to Frost & Sullivan.
What is the biggest misconception about unified communications and why?
Some misconceptions customers have had about UC that we've heard are things like: They think they have to rip and replace their entire infrastructure in order to reap the benefits of UC and that cannot be further from the truth. We have an installed base that is still using a combination of analog phones, as well as digital telephony.
Another last misconception is UC equals unified messaging and your ability to see or hear your voicemail or your email. That is not UC. UC is a much richer, multimedia experience tied to many more components than just messaging
Where is Asia in terms of UC adoption?
In 2008, we saw great momentum across Asia in the enterprise area of our business, especially in China, India and South East Asia and we’re on target for our stated goal for Asia to represent around 25% of Nortel’s business in the next couple of years.
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