Unified communications is fast transitioning from being an ill-defined buzzword to a business must-have. While all the major networking operators have been pushing the technology for some time, even some large software makers, notably Microsoft, are hoping to get in on the act. But what does it all mean to corporate IT and the end user?
Every client we talk to now wants a unified communications roadmap, says Richard England, general manager channels at BT Global Services They often ask for things without necessarily knowing it’s unified communications.
Part of the problem is that unified communications (UC) still means so much to so many different people. It’s one of the reasons, I think, why it’s not necessarily received mainstream adoption, although we’re starting to see it now, says England.
He defines UC, at its lowest level, as the conversion of desktop, non-real time applications with real-time applications. A simple example would be a click-to-call form of a horizontal application, such as Microsoft Office, or vertical application such as an ASP in a customer relationship management environment.
At an elevated level, UC looks like a software infrastructure platform that consolidates directly into other applications. The platform includes IP telephony, call management, audio and video conferencing, instant messaging and presence: all through a single desktop or mobile device.
Cisco defines UC as the unification of all communications including voice, video, IM, presence, contact centre, messaging and collaboration applications across fixed and mobile devices, according to Tim Stone, the company’s senior marketing manager of unified communications in Europe.
Avaya director of unified communications, Diane Shariff, says the result of UC is a seamless user experience across all communications, regardless of what network, device or PC you’re using.
Time saving
The key benefit of UC is the reduction of human latency, says England. In other words, making some of the serial activities parallel. For example, if you are working on a spreadsheet and a client requests a meeting with you, a message box may appear in the corner of your spreadsheet screen and you can simply click to respond, rather than having to exit your spreadsheet application.
Also, an absence of UC means large documents are often passed across the network several times, which drains networking and storage resources.
There are four main reasons why Avaya customers have implemented UC. The top driver is enhanced customer experience. England cites an example of a US law firm with 150 lawyers that needed to be able to access their clients regardless of their location. And getting hold of the right lawyer in a timely fashion also was essential.
Supporting an increasingly mobile sales force or workforce has also been a huge driver, Shariff says. There are also an increasing number of initiatives to reduce a company’s carbon dioxide footprint, which is encouraging adoption.
The third main driver has been business continuity, the idea of being able to work effectively from anywhere. Shariff cites an Avaya client, a financial services institution with 2,000 workers in Manhattan, New York, as an example. They need to know that if something happens they can continue to operate and support their customers; and their idea is their people can work effectively from home or they can move all the people to one central site in New Jersey.
The fourth reason is saving money and reducing costs. Certainly, the top line plus the bottom line is extremely important and there are many ways to reap the benefits of an ROI in unified communications, Shariff says. She points to the reduction of mobile phone calls among employees on a corporate campus. Being able to see where an employee is physically located and knowing their availability via a presence client means other workers can simply click to call them rather than make a more expensive mobile phone call. Another ROI example is bringing voice conferencing in-house, rather than using expensive third-party services.
UC also has an ROI for telecommuters at home, she says. For example, having a single phone number for a mobile and office phone means the cost always goes through the corporate network, so there is no need to have a second line installed. Call-back service to a worker’s home phone, which ensures privacy, is another example.
The majority of UC customers at BT Global Services are moving now into trialling the technology, either in a specific department or within their own IT world to see how it looks or feels, England says. Often, it is not until the product actually makes it into the hands of the end user that a company appreciates the benefits of UC.
Further driving adoption is the increased usage of UC in the home, such as instant messaging, click to talk and click to web-cam, according to England. Video collaboration and presence, both fixed and mobile, are among the most in-demand components of UC, he adds.
Shariff says an increasingly mobile workforce is pushing up demand for UC. More than half of companies consider at least part of their workforce to be virtual. And research shows that next year, about 72% of the US workforce will become remote or mobile. Companies also are looking to UC to better prepare for unforeseen disasters, such as weather or terrorism. They want to make sure they can respond to customers from anywhere, she says.
Stone at Cisco says the main drivers of UC include PBX replacement, whether it is for end of life, end of maintenance, end of Centrex contact or greenfield deployments. Branch consolidation and virtualisation, contact centre virtualisation and customer contact and collaboration applications are also cited as motivators.
Common pitfalls
While enterprise and mid-market companies have been the early adopters of UC, small to medium-sized business has been the fastest-growing sector for UC in the past year, starting from a relatively small base.
Among the most common pitfalls companies fall into when deploying UC is getting caught up in the industry hype, which can lead to an expensive mistake, says Chris de Silva, managing director of NEC Philips in the UK. Be wary of attempts by vendors to sell ‘unified communications’ devices that are simply rebranded technology. Why should you need to invest in expensive ‘new look’ IP phones when existing infrastructure such as your PC can be utilised more effectively in a ‘joined-up’ way?
Replacing legacy equipment with IP telephony is not a prerequisite for UC, de Silva says. By taking a phased approach and looking to optimise what is in existence, users can achieve ‘quick-win’ benefits driving rapid ROI.
Companies also must understand their ‘pain points,’ which are inefficient or unnecessary processes that impede workers from being effective. UC should facilitate improvements in a company’s current business processes: not dictate what those processes should be, says de Silva.
BT’s England agrees that deploying UC is not a case of ripping out all existing infrastructure. It typically takes three years for a major multinational enterprise to roll out UC to every employee across all devices. It takes this long to rationalise switch and server infrastructure, as well as LAN/WAN IP infrastructure. It also takes time to implement potentially new devices, to integrate UC with business processes and to adopt UC software across the enterprise, which means rationalising a plethora of legacy mail systems. And training employees how to use the system is another consideration. Depending on an enterprise’s geography and legacy depreciation, England says this could take as long as five years at the outside.
Dynamic development
De Silva recommends identifying a pilot group within the company that could benefit quickly from improved communications. This proof-of-concept approach can be used to demonstrate ROI and refine objectives for the project, if necessary. Companies should measure and monitor progress between stages and dynamically develop the solution.
Cisco, however, after conducting hundreds of ROI studies, does not advocate a slow migration to IP telephony. The evidence confirms that operational savings are typically in the 5% to 30% range, says Stone. A hybrid approach means companies have to wait years to achieve the full benefits. We believe that a fully converged network is the foundation to be able to deliver UC in a scalable, reliable and manageable way. That would be our recommended approach. Having said that, however, Stone says many Cisco UC applications are integrated on legacy PBX/hybrid environments.
Cisco UC customer GCap Media – the UK’s largest commercial radio company, with stations including Classic FM, Capital and XFM – spent three years deploying a Cisco converged network. It now has 2,000 Cisco IP telephones running off four Cisco Unified Call Manager servers, and runs Cisco MultiCast and QoS for audio broadcast content.
GCap head of network infrastructure, Aidan Hancock, says the project high-lighted the importance of ensuring that every part of the network infrastructure fully supported real-time services, and was under active monitoring and management. Real-time interactive traffic like UC will expose any previously hidden performance problems on a network, he says.
Also, training technical staff well on how the new technologies work was critical, Hancock says. He also recommends finding key users who will become evangelists for the new technology, ideally from several parts of the company.
Honda’s Formula One Racing F1 Team, which is headquartered in the UK, uses Avaya Communication Manager, One-X Mobile and Modular Messaging. David France, IT director of Honda’s Racing F1 Team, says it is too early yet for any business observations of the technology. But, as a technical observation, it clearly was important to ensure a good rapport between the Avaya engineers installing UC and the in-house team that understands the infrastructure. UC needs to be embedded within the infrastructure.
A recent survey commissioned by Psytechnics, whose products measure the quality of UC, suggested that nine out of 10 IT managers in large UK enterprises do not yet understand the additional complexities of handling IP telephony and UC data.
The road to ROI
For UC to be a long-term reality, Psytechnics CEO, Anthony Finbow, recommends appointing a dedicated chief communications officer to conceive a UC strategy and ensure it is deployed and configured correctly. This is the best first step to a subsequent unified communications roll out. A COO needs quality-of-service tools, as well as tools to diagnose problems such as echo, varying volume level and hiss across a UC network.
As companies begin to introduce unified communications, it will be a full time job to ensure that the various components of the network infrastructure and devices are performing, as well as ensure quality of user experience remains as expected.
Prior to its UC installation, Cisco customer GCap did a very detailed initial ROI plan, which predicted savings at 18 months, says Hancock. However, savings proved to be greater and actual ROI was delivered in 15 months. As a result of its UC deployment, the company is saving in excess of £1m annually.
But ROI often is not that clear cut for UC deployments. At Honda, France says the key benefit of UC was giving its team members mobility. No ROI has been done, he says. As a Formula One motor racing team we are always up against the clock. Shortening time is always a key challenge to us: be that race car lap times or car development time. For us the key benefit of UC is to allow people mobility without losing contact with their colleagues: key team members are not tied to one location.
CBR opinion
As with so many emergent technologies, marketing and hype has been responsible for a great deal of mis-selling in the unified communications space. But if you are clear what the intended benefits are, but also ensure that planning, training and monitoring/management are all clear elements within the project, then unified communications should live up to its promise.
