I’ve been watching with interest how Unified Communications[1] has been unfolding in the market over the last while. As you probably know by now, I created hereiam™ out of exasperation for not having available cost effective tools to do business while mobile and we made sure that we work well with UC platforms. The big hype with UC is the promise of cost reductions and productivity benefits albeit within enterprise walls. Since the early 2000s, suppliers have been touting UC as the next big telecom wave. The reality is that UC has not taken over the world the way it was first envisioned, but the trend is positive. When you really look into it, UC is really an idea or a concept and not a product. It would be nice to have an environment where еνеrу method of communicating іѕ јυѕt a click away, but this is nirvana. UC has been more like a slow burn in the market. Here’s a quick scan of UC today. For deploying UC there are two main avenues, buying a platform outright or as a hosted solution from a service provider. Cisco, Microsoft and Avaya lead the market in offering enterprise UC solutions with features like presence, instant messaging, integrated voice and text and conferencing. They market cost effective solutions but this needs to be scrutinized by exactly what it will cost to get you there. It’s nice to have inexpensive IP phones at your office and ‘soft phones’ to work offsite. But many companies are still trying to get their arms around what UC is, how UC will benefit their organization and what the ROI will be.
The cost to build your data network including security and redundancy to properly support this infrastructure (including hardware upgrades and network provisioning) could become cost prohibitive. There’s still is a big caveat and here’s the crux of it- there needs to be a real business pain and an understanding of how UC can satisfy the pain. It may mean that the existing enterprise data network will need to be upgraded. UC capabilities will only be as good as the network including Quality of Service. This has become costly for some enterprises and no ROI.
You can decide not to buy equipment and have a hosted service from Bell, Allstream and Primus and smaller firms like BlueArc, among others. If you go this route, you need to be careful about what you’re actually getting. When looking at a hosted solution, read the small print of the contract including time periods (3 years is too long) and what it will cost you to get out of the contract. If they say you can have soft phones working off-site, get this in writing (some can’t do this). Even for hosted solutions, check also for what infrastructure is required when facilities are needed from the ‘street’ level up to where you are in an office building. If you require fiber you’ll probably have to pay and this could negate your ROI.
In the past it was cost, complexity, and network capabilities as the leading barriers to deploying unified communication but mobility is topping the list in importance in business today. Professionals use their cell as much as or more than their wireline devices. They expect, and quite frankly, demand the same type of business tools to be as productive and efficient while travelling as they are in the office. If you’re seriously starting to look at UC for your enterprise, it’s highly recommended that you address the mobility aspects of your enterprise to ensure an overall total solution for UC.
It could be that there are other solutions instead of a forklift PBX that could solve your business needs. There are mobility solutions including hereiam™ that can give your workers the right business tools when mobile to make them more productive and cost effective. There are also major inroads by non- traditional providers like Skype and Google that are making plays in this space. The bottom line is that you really have to understand your business needs- adopting new UC technology because it’s sexy can be quite expensive and not get you much.
[1] From Wikipedia, Unified Communications (UC) is the integration of real-time communication services such as instant messaging (chat), presence information, telephony (including IP telephony), video conferencing, call control and speech recognition with non-real-time communication services such as unified messaging (integrated voicemail, e-mail, SMS and fax).
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