Ntegrated Solutions

I recently ran across a blog posting by Dave Gilbert at SimpleSignal and wanted to share his thoughts with you on the subject of Unified Communications (UC).  I have taken excerpts from his blog to help us all understand the power of Unified Communications and the value it can bring to your business.

As IP Telephony has become mainstream many enterprises have began to adopt communication strategies that integrate voice, video, and data onto a single platform.  In its worldwide forecast published in June, Wainhouse Research found hosted Unified Communications will grow from $200 million today to $1 billion in 2011 and more than $5 billion in 2014. A competitive report, released by Radicati Group Inc. in May, similarly projected the market would reach nearly $5 billion by 2013 while its 2009 estimates where at $2.9 billion. North America Hosted Unified Communications revenue is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 400 percent between 2009 and 2013. That is actually a very small number since most true hosted Unified Communications deployments started only last fall; thus the incredible revenue growth rate projection. Hosted Unified Communications seat growth for North America has a similar trajectory, climbing 273 percent over the forecast period.

Based on interviews with analysts and service providers, Unified Communications at a base level must include three elements — telephony, messaging and presence — integrated into a single interface. Beyond those core capabilities, consensus breaks down. The most common add-onsmentioned are mobility (i.e., fixed mobile convergence or FMC), collaboration and conferencing, and integration with business software applications, such as CRM.

The pitch for Unified Communications must necessarily go beyond the cost-savings discussion that has been fairly successful at convincing companies to migrate premises-based point solutions like IP PBXs and e-mail to hosted versions. Communicating the business benefits of Unified Communications is key.

While cost may not be the only reason for outsourcing hosted Unified Communications, there’s a great story to tell here, providers say, and it’s resonating well with companies of all sizes during the recession. Simply put, it just costs less money to install a hosted Unified Communications solution than buy a piece of equipment and put it in a closet in your office.

For instance, Microsoft’s OCS requires 12 servers by itself without tying it to a PBX. Adding other applications, such as Web conferencing and secure chat, only serves to drive the cost higher. The capital requirements are massive if you want to take this on, this doesn’t even address the soft costs of personnel to manage and maintain it. And the demands for knowledgeable IT staff don’t end once the system is deployed. Depending on the vendor of your Unified Communications platform, you do need a level of expertise to appropriately manage it, and that level of expertise increases as your enterprise size increases as well. Using SimpleSignal takes the worry away. Our highly trained technical staff manage all the complexities of running the Unified Communications platform. So outsourcing hosted Unified Communications can not only offer a company the benefits of the technology faster, it can offer the scalability required to meet growing —or shrinking—needs.

Another consideration is the cost of having a backup location in support of business continuity. Hosted Unified Communications applications include all the accoutrement of a data center, including backup power, site redundancy and high-capacity bandwidth connectivity.

An additional “hidden” cost is keeping up with technology migration. New revs are coming faster and faster — not all of them are software, some are hardware — and those costs are unpredictable about when they are going to come and how much they are.

Wise companies are considering the reality that because technology is changing so fast, companies are increasingly worried about taking on the “capital risk” of a hardware solution and looking for ways to “future proof” their voice infrastructure.

The opex picture for hosted Unified Communicationsalso looks pretty good when considering that just subscribing to point solutions like Web conferencing alone can be $60-plus per month per employee.

Money isn’t the only thing businesses need a lot of to implement Unified Communications on their own. Deploying a best-of-breed solution takes expertise in spades, and since it’s newer technology, that means research and time. A hosted Unified Communicationsprovider has brought together myriad solutions, such as Microsoft OCS, Cisco Unified Communications Manager, integration with CRM like ACT! and Salesforce.com, Microsoft Exchange, Google Apps and more.

Hosted solutions make it easy for a business to deploy Unified Communications. When you go with a hosted solution, it really is an on-demand type of relationship. We can have a full Unified Communications application in a four-week period instead of an 18-month period (for an on-premises solution).

This mind shift along with increased resource (people and cash) restraints due to the recession may be the reason that increasingly larger companies are moving to hosted Unified Communications.

It seems that our biggest problem is awareness. Most businesses aren’t really aware, especially if they are smaller companies, that hosted Unified Communications is an option. Now is the time for our great company to come to the aid of our country.

Tags: Hosted Unifed Communications | IP PBX | IP Telephony | VoIP

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