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Allowing guests as well as staff to enjoy seamless communication, Hotelier India investigates the importance of unified communication in hotels.

An employee uses multiple communication tools not only in the office or at home, but also while travelling and even during vacations.

At present, businesses are becoming more and more ‘virtual’, which means a business or its workers are not necessarily confined to one physical office or address and might be running with many decentralised elements, most of which exist only online.

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Hence, due to lack of integration of various communication tools such as phones, faxes, emails and video conferencing, the use of these different technologies is not optimised. As a result, while communication might be effective, it might not be efficient, both technically and economically.

Now it is possible to have phone, video conferencing, instant messaging and fax integrated into a single service with minimum hardware. This is Unified Communication (UC) in simple words.

UC is the integration of real-time communication services such as instant messaging, telephony (including IP telephony), video conferencing, call control and speech recognition with non-real-time communication services such as unified messaging (integrated voicemail, e-mail, SMS and fax).

UC is not a single product, but a set of products that provides a consistent unified user-interface and user-experience across multiple devices and media types.

Owing to the widespread effects of the recession, in 2009 the industry witnessed a significant increase in adoption of conferencing technologies by enterprises for business continuity.

The major advantage that these solutions carry is travel cost cutting, real-time collaboration, better connectivity and improved collaboration irrespective of the location of individuals.

With the growing need for companies to save on their travel expenses, enterprises are largely adopting audio-video conferencing solutions in order to replace the need for face-to-face business meetings.

Traditional communication vendors are now embracing IP telephony as the future standard for enterprise communications. Along with the advantage of flexibility given to end users, IP telephony allows users to reduce costs by combining their voice and data networks.

Even in sectors like hospitality, unified communications represent an unprecedented opportunity to streamline communications across the board and enrich the entire guest experience with improved service times, personalised assistance and quality communications.

Guests can enjoy ubiquitous access to excellent service while management, concierges and staff can have secure, anytime-access to the information and resources they need to best perform their jobs.