Connection control will help deliver Unified Communications

Monday, August 9th, 2010 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor

It is fair to say that after many years of being touted as the ‘next big thing’ and heralded as a panacea for all the ills and shortcomings of enterprise communications, discussions about Unified Communications (UC) are becoming more realistic. There is an increasing acceptance that UC, in some form, is an inevitability for most organisations, but adoption will not be uniform and will certainly not be immediate.

However, this is not to downplay the promise of UC – it is significant, particularly at the large enterprise level where the most significant cost savings and productivity gains look likely to be made. For these larger organisations, nirvana would be the successful integration of 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), not to mention the possibilities of overlaying social networking and web services.

Sounds great, doesn’t it?! Even if a company realises only half of the benefits that UC vendors are promising, they would be on to a winner. However, a word of warning – no matter how you’re communicating and what you’re communicating on, the connection is still king.

In other words, what is the point of going to all the trouble of implementing a UC strategy, if you still let your employees decide how, where and when they get online? Corporate control of the connection must underpin a UC strategy.
UC (in theory) should make it easier for employees to communicate, share data and access critical applications – but this all requires a connection. That could obviously be a local network connection or home broadband, but equally it could be 3G connection, a roaming voice call, or a hotel Wi-Fi connection, all of which come at a cost.

Let’s say you calculate, during your proof of concept, that a UC implementation will save you £20 per employee per month (bear in mind I’ve just plucked that figure out of thin air). That’s a significant saving over, say, 3,000 employees – £60,000 a month my calculator reliably informs me. But that £20 per head begins to look pretty fragile if you’re letting employees take connectivity into their own hands and relying on them to police themselves where costs are concerned. Employees could easily account for £20 with a couple of expensive hotel Wi-Fi subscriptions or an unnecessary blast of overseas 3G data roaming.

Enforcing least-cost connections and cost-containment policies as well as ensuring employees don’t have to take connectivity into their own hands will play an important part in delivering on the promise of UC. Otherwise, cost savings will quickly be wiped out and that ROI that the IT department promised the board will appear to be on very shaky ground.

Tags: Industry