Unified business communication, which brings together mobile and fixed-line phones, instant messages and e-mails, is the wave of the future, according to experts and business people in China's IT industry.

"Every revolution of telecom technology will reduce the cost of communication and a unified communication platform will greatly improve production efficiency for companies," said Thomas Lam, president of Cisco Systems (China) Networking Technology Co.

The term unified communications, which mainly targets enterprises, combines voice, video, data and mobile messaging under one telecommunications platform.

A survey by American Sage Research of some multinationals shows that employees each use 6.4 telecommunication tools on the average.

Network convergence is the trend of the telecommunication industry and large enterprises have started to combine their various telecommunication networks to save costs and enhance efficiency, said Wang Yuguan, president of American market research company Frost & Sullivan's China brank.

A report by Frost & Sullivan said China's IP telecom market is likely to grow by more than 30 percent every year and by 2010 IP telecom will account for 80 percent of enterprise communications.

Source: Xinhua