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With so many ideas and definitions of Unified Communications (News - Alert) (UC), it is difficult to determine the value it delivers to businesses. However, if the number of e-mails, voicemails, telephone calls, instant messages, newspapers and Web sites the average employee encounters during a given day are considered, it is clear this abundance of information brings employees into a faster, more challenging work environment.

 

Businesses require an all-inclusive unified communications approach with the understanding that communication needs vary depending upon the organization. There are three categories based on communication needs of individuals and company departments: Basic, Enhanced and Role-based.

 

Basic organizations may require little more than dial tone and e-mail, while the enhanced group likely is exploring the need for one of the more established UC applications, such as unified messaging, mobility and presence, to enhance business productivity.

 

The role-based organization, meanwhile, is a company that has grown more complex and has internal functions that may require some level of integration with business applications. This may be achieved through IP voice infrastructure, a variety of UC applications, professional services and some degree of ongoing maintenance. Role-based segmentation allows complex integration with legacy and future technologies, and a distributed software-based architecture, which creates opportunities for communications automation at the business process level.

 

From the basic to the most complex role-based organization, UC provides value-added applications to deliver ROI savings that customers purchasing IP telephony systems require. Companies deploying UC at any level can realize greater productivity through the convergence of communication channels and business processes using a combination of technologies, devices and services, including presence, status, mobility, collaboration, video and voice conferencing, and messaging.

 

As statistics from a study (Getting More Out of Unified Communications) conducted by the Aberdeen (News - Alert) Group in March 2007 show, 63 percent of respondents believe productivity is very important to overall business performance. However, out of that group, only 14 percent are satisfied with their level of productivity.

 

UC is the way for businesses to address this concern, and a study, Driving Workforce Productivity with Unified Communications, (September 2007) from the Aberdeen Group shows that companies investing in UC technology are seeing proven results of higher revenues and gross margins compared to companies that are investing less in the technology.

 

In general, there are several high-level market drivers for UC, summarized as follows:

 

 

Maintaining customer connections is one of the most vital activities for a business based on the need to quickly identify and resolve problems. Customers are best served if they are able to reach their vendors quickly and at-will, creating a win-win for both sides. The presence capability of UC augments this by enabling users to automatically tell if other users are available for conversations and what mediums they prefer. This feature, along with Find Me/Follow Me, enables users to connect faster, and with presence supported across multiple devices, the act of contacting people is streamlined. Single-number reach solutions typically combine presence and Find Me/Follow Me to allow the contactor to simply dial one number while the UC system takes care of the rest. A study from Forrester Research (News - Alert) in 2006 (Unified Communications Industry Study) found that more than 75 percent of respondents stated that single-number reach for decision makers would save their companies time and money.

 

With the integration of different devices such as call centers, presence and softphones, UC applications can significantly improve customer service. Customer service representatives have faster access to information as well as more correlated information. Another customer service example would be new Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solutions that are available with UC, enabling tighter integration between applications. IVR can improve application functionality by providing the user with voice automated features that make it easier for the user to multitask, as well as provide input for call routing. (Note figure.)

 

 

 

For businesses, UC will become an indispensable feature because it allows companies to react to change quickly and more accurately. In the real world, technology changes have begun to accelerate as compared to the last 100 years. Businesses need to keep up with those changes and translate those changes into their business processes. For instance, when email was first introduced, it was not considered vital to the company. In today’s economy email is crucial.

 

Unified Messaging (a typical component of UC implementations) is another example. A 2006 Sage Research study (Unified Communications Application: Uses and Benefits) revealed that “employees without unified messaging spend more than 75 minutes a day handling e-mail, voicemail, and fax messages. But central management of unified messaging saves people an average of 43 minutes a day — a 57percent improvement in productivity.”

 

A UC client is a technology improvement that will have the same effect. Currently, a UC client may be viewed as a luxury, but in a couple of years this feature will be a mainstream business requirement.

 

Less integration issues and costs for the IT department is always a concern for businesses. According to the Sage Research study, 22 percent of organizations experience monthly communication-caused delays to company projects and 13 percent experience weekly delays. UC helps minimize these issues because key personnel are more accessible and information can be relayed better and faster.

 

Collaboration is another value-packed feature of UC and can include application and document sharing, whiteboard, chat and conferencing (voice, video and Web). In a 2006 IDC study (The High Cost of Not Finding Information), it was found that knowledge workers spend between 15 to 35 percent of their time searching for information and are successful in finding what they seek only 50 percent of the time or less. In addition, the study found that 40 percent of corporate users cannot find necessary information their intranets. With information repositories such as Sharepoint, unified messaging and conferencing capabilities, workers are kept informed better than before. Other savings also result from decreased travel costs because face-to-face meetings can be replaced using desktop sharing and cost-effective video conferencing.

 

The ability to optimize geographically diverse people (seamless teaming) has become paramount to enterprises and medium businesses. According to a 2005 Nemertes Research study, (Building the Successful Virtual Workplace) 90 percent of worldwide workers did not work at corporate headquarters. In addition, between 40 to 70 percent of the workers did not work in the same location as their supervisor, making teamwork more difficult to create and manage. At the same time, the cost savings of remote workers has been hard to ignore in a global economy.

 

UC also makes life easier for end users because there are fewer devices to manage. Device consolidation and a UC client that can provide a common look and feel across remaining devices can lower training costs associated with integrated UC solutions. Instead of the customer base trying to integrate separate technology, UC allows customers to implement technology that is pre-designed to work together, thus avoiding significant post sale integration headaches. In addition, a common look and feel across multiple devices makes it easier for end users which equates to less IT staff time to resolve issues.

 

A fundamental benefit of UC is that it creates a flexible and scalable solution for employee mobility. Employee mobility is based upon the inherent aspects of IP as well as IP applications. Therefore, mobility is a result of both wired and wireless features such as: extension mobility, Wireless LAN, softphones, Fixed Mobile Convergence (Cell-Fi), etc. All of these features deliver value and cost savings.

 

For most organizations, mobility has become synonymous with profitability because the work force has transitioned over the last two decades to a large base of knowledge workers. These knowledge workers must communicate in person with others on another floor, another building in a campus, with others across the country and anywhere a customer may be located. In the Forrester Research study, 74 percent of healthcare respondents believe portable wireless devices would save at least half an hour a day, per person for nursing staff. In addition, faster response times are also part of the value proposition as this directly correlates to better customer service and satisfied customers. This is expanded upon in another study from J. Gold Associates in 2006 (Compliance in the Mobile Enterprise), which states that most enterprises rank mobility and mobile worker deployments within their top five initiatives between 2006 and 2009.

 

Because there are so many different definitions and viewpoints about UC, a fundamental question asked by those interested in UC solutions is, “In what direction do I go?” One group of vendors, led by Microsoft (News - Alert), comes at UC from a desktop perspective, so most of their applications focus on desktop productivity. Other vendors (such as Cisco) come at it from the infrastructure perspective and focus on enabling hardware. A third group of vendors come down the middle and allow customers to pick elements from both the left and the right as needed. So what’s a business decision maker supposed to do?

 

As is the general case in life, the middle road is often the best. In this example, a middle road approach means that the customer does not need to make a choice of desktop or infrastructure; they can take the best applications from both sides. This middle road will allow the maximum amount of value from UC solutions simply because of the vast amount of applications and features available to the business decision maker.

 

In the end, the potential value of UC is enormous, particularly for role-based companies. UC opens the floodgate to productivity at all role levels because applications are what really deliver the value. The degree of savings, however, mirrors the degree of investment and deployment made by business decision makers.

 

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