Exclusive: Verizon eyes India with a unique platform, says Vice President Frank Ciccone

Verizon is deploying a massive global expansion plan with its new cloud solutions platform, Unified Communications and Collaboration as a Service (UCCaaS) that provides a secure and reliable collaboration framework to the businesses. In today’s digital and global economy, it’s essential that mobile and remote employees communicate and collaborate virtually with colleagues, clients and partners as if they were in the same room together. India being an important market for global companies and businesses, Verizon enters India too.

Frank Ciccone, Vice President & Executive Managing Director, Verizon, talks about the benefits of the plan and their future plans in India, in chat with Business Insider India.

What are the benefits of UCCaaS?

The platform allows one to collaborate on any device of choice securely and reliably. The reality is across the enterprise it is not easy to apply it, especially as there are security concerns. UCCaaS platform allows it around the globe in a very consistent way. There are certain components to the platform.

• Global expansion of UCCaaS to Europe and Asia Pacific including in-country support for major commercial hubs such as Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Germany, France and the Netherlands. Verizon provides in-region geographic redundancy of its UCCaaS services via its data centers in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Singapore and Hong Kong.

• Cisco Collaboration Meeting Rooms Cloud provides simple, easy-to-use collaboration capabilities for intra-business, B2B and B2C applications from any standards-based video device. The new offering — which allows attendees to collaborate using voice, video, content share, white boarding and more — is expected to be commercially available in July and will integrate with Verizon UCCaaS or can be purchased as a stand-alone service. Attendees can join a collaboration room from virtually any video device — laptop, tablet, smartphone, desktop, video room system or telepresence room system.

• Integrated global contact centers, expected to be available in the second half of 2015, deliver cloud-based contact center capabilities for improving the customer experience and can be integrated with UCCaaS. Cloud-based contact centers allow enterprises to serve their customers in a more powerful, flexible and cost-effective manner, with the ability to easily scale resources up or down based on business needs.

• Mobile integration will allow customers to leverage Verizon UCCaaS over wireless networks with no VPN connections required. U.S. customers can leverage Verizon’s expansive 4G LTE network, while global customers can use their local mobile broadband network.

• Self-service management portals allow customers to quickly and easily implement provisioning changes to their service, including service moves and adds, helping control management costs, increase business agility and improve customer responsiveness.

How can it help Indian enterprises?

Companies today want to introduce two key things: they want to drive innovation in order to stay relevant in this world and they also need to retain top talent. And India is no different.

So, for the former factor, every progressive company ensures that they remain innovative by ensuring collaboration. In order to do that you also need to retain top talent. The best part is there are a lot of companies in India that are adopting blogs, podcasts and tweets and videos and other similar things in order to drive innovation.

How do you see the Indian market?

It is an emerging market with a lot of reach and growth in every vertical and we see a lot of potential there. As a market it is a very large territory with large sections constantly traveling globally for businesses. We believe that there is a real good opportunity to enable collaboration through technology. The expanding smartphone market is an important factor that we want to take advantage of.

What are your future plans for India?

Also, Indian BPO market is the largest BPO market for us. So we are working to build a platform to cater to those capabilities. We wish to capture the huge BPO commerce by deploying collaboration platforms and centres in India.

Our platform will change the way people work. We are building a platform in India with partners around the world that we are going to connect into. So we can actually communication enable some of these business processes with applications to impact them more significantly. We have a product out there called Secure Cloud Interconnect service, a software-defined networking offering, that helps enterprises seamlessly connect, manage and secure their cloud environments that often extend across multiple clouds and data centers around the globe.

We are also expanding our ecosystem of application providers by connecting into them.

What more should India do to attract global companies?

Open markets create opportunities. What is important to us is the ability to operate freely within the company and be able to offer the services on a standard space to connect various companies. And, India is a country where we have reliable business partners.

(Image credits: perfectrelations)