Using unified communications

Jodie Humphries

Unified communications (UC) is a rather abstract concept. This is not a neat, one-size-fits-all technology - UC deployments vary from company to company, depending on each particular business' needs. A report earlier on in the year found that unified communications will make its way into offices in some shape or form in the not too distant future.

Research carried out by Freeform Dynamics in December 2009 with 544 enterprises confirmed that UC is increasingly on the enterprise agenda in some shape or form.

New ways of communicating have continually worked themselves into businesses in a relatively unstructured manner over the years. As a result, when asked to take a step back and consider how well their workforce communications meet business needs today, fewer than one in five of the 544 participants in a recent online survey regarded their current infrastructure as supporting fully efficient and effective working, with most businesses readily acknowledging shortfalls.

Despite the cost associations, unified communications unites your different messaging mediums, allowing staff to access their communications irrespective of what medium they're in or what device the worker is using.

Benefits of using unified communications

According to Martin Saunders, Senior Technical Consultant for Amicus ITS, UC can provide a business with a competitive advantage by allowing customers and business partners to easily identify and communicate with the right people within an organisation. New customers can be won by making the business easy and quick to work with - thus shortening the sales cycle. Customer retention can be improved with the increased customer satisfaction that goes hand-in-hand with better communication. UC can help businesses make their workforces more productive by reducing the need to travel; directly saving time and transport costs. UC enables remote meetings without a substantial loss in the quality of contact between meeting participants by providing high quality voice and video and by allowing presentations to be shared.

Cathy Ham, General Manager of Global Portfolio and Marketing at BT Conferencing, states that UC can help people get their work done without the need to travel so much. Travel costs for face-to-face meetings are a major avoidable cost, but only if the alternatives to doing business are economically viable, user-friendly and offer business quality. Audio, web and video conferencing offer such solutions and increasing numbers of organisations, in all areas of business and public service, are discovering the business benefits they can help deliver. These conferencing solutions are often the means by which most people experience effective, unified and real-time collaboration for the first time - UC in action. As an example of the cost benefits that can be achieved, our experience with customers shows that for an organisation of 10,000 people, the typical travel cost for a face-to-face meeting is in the order of €121. Conferencing typically replaces 52 percent of face-to-face meetings, yielding a €1.3 million P&L saving. Adding in the savings in unproductive time (salary cost) while travelling can extend the overall P&L saving to €2 million.

Quest for unified communications

According to Forrester, unified communications have caught the imagination of more than 80 percent of European enterprises, who are said to be in some stage of a unified communications implementation, it is no wonder there are strong forecasts for growth over the next couple of years. Business Insights penned the growth of UC at a CAGR of 12 percent from US$21.5 billion in 2008 to US$37.3 billion by 2013 for the global market. This shouldn't be that surprising though, considering that most of the European workforce is within reach of multiple communication points, from phones to e-mail and instant messaging.

Another common component of UC systems is 'presence' - which is a bit like an IM status update. This enables a worker to see where their colleagues are located and how they would prefer to be contacted at any given moment. With presence, you can easily see which of those colleagues are currently in the office and how they each prefer to be contacted - by phone, email, IM and so on.

The quest for a unified communications implementation will often start with the IT department. Conveying needs back into the business can be tricky, however. For example, explaining to a CFO that a UC installation is needed when he sees only a perfectly adequate set of systems in place is no easy task.

Justifying an implementation then becomes a juggling act, which may be made more difficult depending on the relative seniority of the groups involved. The same exercise could be carried out with video conferencing, web conferencing, mobile SMS and so on, and result in similar outcomes - but no overall conclusion about the organisation's ITC strategy.

By then, looking at what returns a technology will deliver, and where it might add value, the company will be able to identify the ROI needed. Repeating this process across a number of different sessions will enable the business to gradually build up an overall picture of its business needs and technology usage.

As well as ending up with a business case that will hold sway with budget holders, it delivers two other important benefits.

The first of these is bringing together stakeholders to discuss business issues from different angles. This in turn ensures that both the issues and solutions are thoroughly understood by key parties in the company.

For UC, Freeform Dynamics research shows companies which involve a broader group of stakeholders are likely to implement UC more aggressively, and more successfully.

By investing in unified communications technology, businesses can offer their workforce the benefits that come with flexible working while also saving money for themselves, according to a report from Frost & Sullivan, which revealed that the market for web conferencing services in Europe grew by 19.3 percent over the course of 2009.

Determination to cut back on overheads such as office costs was believed to be behind this demand.

Commenting, technology service firm Star's director of convergence and network strategy, Hugo Harber, stated that unified communications can benefit both employers and workers in a number of different ways.

"Better management of resources, reduced consumption and optimisation are all good for a business' health, as well as the planet's," he explained.

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