Unifying tools of communication
In today's global environment, a vast majority of companies experience a set of continually increasing business pressures, regardless of industry or size. While not all companies experience the same pressures, the results are remarkably similar.
In order to compete effectively, they must become increasingly agile. In this context, a company is considered to be agile if it can respond in 'real time' to situations that impact the health and well being of the enterprise and its stakeholders.
So, as companies open their doors and become extended, global enterprises, they need the ability to communicate and collaborate faster over multiple devices and mediums. Recent research indicates that in order to become more agile, organisations are turning towards Unified Communications (UC) which is increasingly becoming the winning solution both in terms of immediate cost reductions and long-term efficiencies.
UC has evolved from simple unified messaging and voicemail integrated into e-mail, to a market where all of a user's collaboration tools are brought together under one umbrella. These tools include telephony, mobile phones, video conferencing, audio and web conferencing, e-mail, soft phones and other commonly used communications devices. Although these devices address the need for faster communications, few of them are linked together. UC brings all of these devices and systems together. It improves the manageability and effectiveness of the ecosystem and makes the enterprise more responsive and agile. It is the convergence of all forms of audio, video, web and desktop communications, built on an Internet Protocol (IP) network that breaks down all distance, time and media barriers. This enables the modern organisation to keep workgroups connected, enable them to collaborate effectively and streamline business processes.
Unified communications is being used by many companies to enhance business processes in large part because it enables effective collaboration, since it does not depend on where a participant is located. It also offers other significant benefits, including increased individual and team productivity, fostering of collaboration, improved relationships, enhanced security and enterprise-class scalability.
Organisations that deploy UC solutions have experienced a measurable impact on their business processes and shortened time to complete projects and sales cycles through faster responses, increased accessibility, mobility (push mail) to converge fixed to mobile environments and improved decision-making and information sharing. For example, by substituting web conferencing with audio and video collaboration for more traditional face-to-face meetings with customers, partners, suppliers, or other employees, businesses can avoid lost productivity due to travel downtime and are able to improve key business metrics.
Avoiding travel expenses is just the beginning of the potential cost savings of using Unified Communications. For online meetings, training, or events, web conferencing is an effective meeting solution that enables people to collaborate with groups of two or of thousands – without leaving their desks. There is a major savings in an organisation's Total Cost of Ownership to migrate from legacy infrastructure on messaging and telephony to a Unified Communications environment, that on top, also provides additional features and productivity benefits at lesser costs.
The greatest value in UC comes from managed and outsourced solutions, where service provides are able to offer end-to-end management across networks and applications platforms. This means a tighter and long term relationship between service provider and customer. The managed services approach is particularly suited to UC, where platforms and applications from multiple vendors need to be integrated and where one supplier is responsible for end-to-end performance as the technology continues to evolve through upgrades and enhanced capabilities.
UC when offered via a carrier class platform with powerful blend of rich media internet applications and mobility features not only enhances the overall customer experience but also leads to significant cost reduction and revenue enablement.
Underpinned by flexible, extensible and integrated IP communications platform, UC can meet customers' future business challenges and scalability needs. Customers using UC can immensely reduce their Total Cost of Ownership and ensure a higher Return on Investment. UC is a proven solution with easy integration to existing applications. Its high availability and low failure rates positively increases operational efficiency.
UC has finally reached the point where the products are mature enough and feature-rich enough that companies can use it to enable new business processes and reach new levels of productivity.
When coupled with continuing innovation by providers and users, UC has the potential to increase productivity and power the global economy forward.
- The writer is the Chief Operating Officer at Smartworld. The views expressed are his own