Enhancing Business Efficiency by Unified Communication

The Department of Financial Informatics and Statistics under the Ministry of Finance and the Nortel Company have recently organised a seminar on “Unified communication with simple approach.” At the meeting, Nortel specialists shared the latest technologies with local enterprises in a hope to introduce the more efficient technologies for them to enhance business efficiency, simplify telecom background and cut operating costs. On the sideline of the seminar, the Vietnam Business Forum had an interview with Mr Ngo Manh Thang, Nortel Vietnam Enterprise Leader, about the unified communication solutions Nortel introduced to Vietnamese customers.

 

The most important is to enhance performance, improve productivity and cut costs for enterprises. All enterprises want their employees to work in the most efficient and productive ways. Or in other words, they spend less for better results. The unified communication refers to a trend in business to simplify and integrate all forms of communications. Companies usually provide their employees with different communication vehicles like mobile phones, landline phones, email or instant messages but these are very complicated because we have so many utilities and we do not what to use for the best. Unified communication enables to integrate all into one.

 

For instance, an employee can have a mobile phone, a laptop and a landline telephone but when he is out of the office, the only communicative vehicle for him is the mobile phone. So what is the unified communication? It is a mobile phone that can send emails, receive messages as Yahoo Messenger, make phone calls and do other things on a simple interface.

 

Importantly, the unified communication enables us to know the status and presence of communicated people. For instance, we can know whether he is online or is using mobile phone or is sending message? Then, we can use suitable communicative vehicles to contact with him. Because unified communication is based on IP (internet protocol), the integration with new services are simpler. For example, we can use video conference. You have used Yahoo Messenger, so you know the voice chat and webcam functions. All these functions will be applied to corporate environment.

 

Thus, what Nortel does is to simplify these solutions and reduce operating costs. The management of these solutions are also simpler.

 

In Vietnam, Nortel has provided many communication solutions and unified communication is one of them. Nortel sees Vietnam a very promising market and believes that there are many opportunities to provide that solution. In terms of unified communication, Nortel ranks the top in the world and we believe that, with its product quality and reputation, Nortel will be successful in Vietnam. We have been already successful in other products and we are confident that this product is also successful.

 

We also know that many providers of unified communication solutions have been present in Vietnam but the strength of Nortel is its close alliance with powerhouses like Microsoft and IBM. These are leading unified communication companies. I want to emphasise that you must have alliance before providing unified communication solution. Otherwise, you will not have many solutions to support your customers.

 

The alliance with IBM enables us to have three operating fields. The first is we cooperate with IBM to conduct research and development activities on UC solutions. The second is we can go to market together. With Microsoft, we cooperate for customer strategy. The third is we can introduce supporting services in UC solutions.

 

Existing users of Nortel products will have more benefits. The integration and upgrading are easy because we can use many old products.