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Unified Communications: what's it going to take at your company?
Unified communications (UC) promises many potentially significant business benefits, especially to mobile users. Most frequently mentioned among these include a single inbox for voice, e-mail and other messages and the ability to have all of your communications "follow" you across multiple locations and devices. But is UC a reality at your company yet? If so, what were the key steps that made it real? If not, why not, and what's it going to take?
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10 Answers
In this economic climate, if a quick ROI can be realized, companies will jump into a technology. The main inhibitor to most companies implementing UC (Unified Communications) simply boils down to ROI.
Take for example a simple process of receiving faxes in your inbox. You have to answer questions like:
1. How much money is spent on fax machine maintenance?
2. How much money is spent on toner & paper?
3. How much do dedicated fax lines cost from the carrier?
4. How much time do employees spend sending and receiving faxes (this includes walking back and forth to the machine)?
5. How many faxes are sent per hour/day/month/year?
Answering these questions takes a lot of time and effort. This is just the tip of the iceberg. When you start looking at IM, video, email, fax, mobile costs, etc. the situation can quickly become overwhelming.
So, companies do one of two things:
1. Start with a small project or single piece of the UC puzzle. The problem with that is a single application may not provide adequate ROI, especially since the first application carries a large portion of the infrastructure costs.
2. Try to do everything at once. This approach typically proves overwhelming from a cost and time perspective.
The best way to do get started with UC is to take an in-depth look at your business processes and figure out which application makes the most financial sense and quickest ROI. Implement that piece and then re-analyze several months after installation. If, and only if, that project has proven fruitful, then proceed to the next lowest hanging fruit from an ROI perspective.
UC is an ongoing process including technologies that haven't even been invented yet. Once a company goes down this road, they'll have a huge competitive advantage... but it may hurt to get started.
What a great topic! We are finding UC adoption to be slow - the reason is that it is very hard work to understand business processes, map roles and responsibilities to the appropriate technology and realize the ROI that was calculated in the business case to begin with. All new technologiew go through an adoption period (remember how long it took for voicemail to take root?) and I think UC is still in the early stages.
Adriana:
With all due respect, you seem to be confusing VoIP and UC - you can one without the other. While UC implementations can greatly benefit from VoIP, you can implement UC with TDM systems and gateways. For example, Genesys offers GETS, which is essentially middleware that enables TDM switches to work with Microsoft OCS. Moving to IP is a great catalyst for moving to UC, and any company that needs to replace their PBX should certainly think about what their UC goals are, and select a platform based on that.
In response to what it's going to take to get companies to start implementing UC, it will take understanding about what business processes and/or user groups will benefit most from UC - whether it's collaboration applications for R&D teams and workgroups, mobile capabilities for sales teams, etc. Companies need to identify the business processes where there are inefficiencies, delays, and human latency, and apply UC where it can provide the most value.
We have lots of articles and blogs about this at www.ucstrategies.com, and will also be discussing this at VoiceCon Orlando. Hope to see you there.
Adriana
I have a feeling your finger is on the pulse of todays business .Even though Voip has been around for a while and there are a l lot of quality product and vendors the only way to keep it tdm reliable is to dedicate circuits, as soon as you go on the Wan you have competition for band width. and you depend on QOS implementation.The pc user in business gets used to slow downloads, down e-mail, shared information getting lost, maybe as uc rolls out with voip over shared bandwidth they will put up with a decrease in quality...
Right now in this economy what would stop deployment ? upgrading routers to
POE and updating the Lan.. and the outlay for new servers and handsets ..for a small business thats bearable but for big business it requires serious consideration
if and when our economy improves it could be like the divestiture days in1984... I'm dating my self ....
I would like tot thank you all for your posts. I am begining to expand my company's VoIP system into a broader UC environment, hopefully one which will also include video, and your replies have raised some interesting questions.
My main concern/ continuing issue with my current system has been that it seems to be overkill for our needs. Unfortunately, I inhereted this system when I came on board. Has anyone found that a hosted UC environment is a viable alternative to an "in house" VoIP server one?
I like this topic!
It seems like everyone is in violent agreement with each other here! I have been providing systems with unified communications for 12 years. From the ESNA product to the most sophisticated VOIP products. It is only the alignment of business objectives with UC capabilities that make sense. Some companies can use UC as a force multiplier for their business and some can't, or don't want to.
What does it take for UC to be deployed? Corporate management that can find some business objective that generates more income, more customer loyalty, or saves money.
Thank you Michael for a great question!
From th feedback I get from many partners and end users I speak to, there is no doubt that businesses are showing growing interest in VoIP. Are they ready to deploy? The question is instead: 'can VoIP be totally reliable for businesses?'. Unified Communications helps streamline information delivery and ensure ease of use. It also empowers businesses with new capabilities and agility, while promising cost savings. This is what businesses are looking for in these time where consolidations and cost-cutting is the priority #1. But can businesses rely 100% or IP Telephony? Main risks include:
Performance and quality of service
End-user training and adoption
Support and resources
I look forward to comments!
Adriana
http://www.linkedin.com/in/adriscalora
To Jonathan's comment earlier today - am not sure what your existing system is, so it's hard to know what you mean by "overkill".
Since you're moving towards UC now - which is great - you and your co-workers will start discovering new ways of using UC - some will be good for your business and some will not. The main thing is that you will learn as you go, and that's part of how the world of multimedia communications works. We all use these tools in different way, and being so new, nobody has really figured all this out.
In short, being successful with UC means having a open mind to what's possible with today's communications technologies and being willing to keep trying new things. This is where hosted UC is really good because you'll always be getting the latest and greatest in new apps. The onus is not on you to figure out what tomorrow's killer app will be. By sticking to in-house, you're much less likely to be exposed to what's new, and more likely to fall behind what your competitors are doing.
Interestingly I can see UC happening in a different way to how it was envisaged back in the late 90's and this may be driven by businesses adopting 'Social Network' type applications and the prevalence of smart phones and tablets.
From a business perspective the ideal situation for me would be one where a central system collected information from existing legacy services dependent on my needs. If I was in Sales driving to a customer I would want to be able to see all communications between my business and that client as well as the status of orders and any outstanding trouble tickets. From this scenario the applications needs to have voice to text (customer voice-mails AND call centre recordings) and fax to text as well as managing e-mails. It also needs to query and take feeds from all other systems that provide information. The Smartphone/Tablet comes into play by interacting either through voice (reading out key parameters on the screen) or standard text and therefore provides a simplified access gateway that negates the need for a PC.
This is probably more Utopian than Unified but I know that there is a big requirement out there for UC as long as it ties everything together and adds value.
We have partially adopted UC by integrating e-mail and voice mail, we will be adding fax to this in the next month. Our management has concerns moving beyond this due to issues with labor contracts. A fully implemented UC can give employees access to corporate communications 24/7. However, if most of the labor force is paid hourly, including technicians, accounting, etc., management has a concern about staff receiving and responding to communications outside of work hours.
Will labor unions consider this overtime? Is checking this communication mandatory? How will this access be tracked?
Bill Baltas
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