Member Article

The business case for Unified Communications

Today’s IT investments require bottom-line, quantifiable truths, and moving to unified communications (UC) is no exception. So how do you convince your board of directors that there is a business case for transforming your communications environment by adopting UC and merging voice, data, and video communications into one consolidated architecture, integrated with key business applications?

Businesses already going down the UC road report that the biggest benefits are efficiency improvements. These include removing communications bottlenecks, speeding up business activities, improving individual productivity, and in many cases seeing a drop in capital expenditure and operating costs.

UC’s flexibility benefits are evident in sectors such as legal services, where the flow of information underpins fee-earning activity. For example, legal executive Joe Smith could begin an interaction with someone on Instant Messenger, then seamlessly escalate that to a phone call, then pickup from his mobile before shifting to a conference all to bring in a third person, and finally share a document for editing.

Traditional communications methods impose barriers by creating telephone tag and email chain scenarios, and removing those obstacles makes communication easier and quicker.

Fears around potential problems in having to untangle a web of disparate islands of technology to make them communicate with each other are easily allayed by choosing solutions from leading UC vendors such as ShoreTel. Its IP phone systems use standards-based modular open architecture that can seamlessly integrate with all major platforms.

The range is designed to cope with anything from one to 10,000 users, and ease of use and ease of management are just a few of the factors behind ShoreTel fast winning market share from its rivals.

Combining UC’s functionality with a cloud-based hosting platform, such as a fully managed service we provide from our new £4m data centre helps businesses by giving them a known cost of ownership, plus a consistent and guaranteed service level and quality of delivery.

For many businesses this can act as a first successful step into implementing cloud services across other parts of the organisation, as they start to see the cost and flexibility benefits of creating an intelligent IT and communications infrastructure that can scale according to needs, for instance with the ability to rapidly bring new sites online, expand, contract or shut down as required.

Rapid deployment of changes and upgrades so the system is always up to date, centralised administration, no support charges and better disaster recovery are other big advantages of a hosted UC solution.

Overall, UC delivers greater customer satisfaction and loyalty, and increased business opportunities. For suppliers it means more efficient operations and faster ways to resolve potential issues, while for partners, communications-enabled solutions make the company easier to do business with. Added up, all of these benefits make a compelling case for implementing UC.

To achieve the best results we need to start thinking about communications in a new way. It is time to look at moving beyond email and towards more productive collaboration throughout the workforce, supplier and customer chain.

UC is not so much a system as it is a way of thinking about the positive impact that the next generation of communications capabilities could have on your business.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by ITPS Ltd .