Business case for UC can be demonstrated
Hugo Harber thinks the time may finally be right for broader UC adoption
It has been a 20-year slow burn for unified communications (UC). However, Yahoo's ban on home working puts the technology back in the spotlight.
Implemented correctly and adopted in full, UC can benefit a business. Our customers save money on IT management and administration, travel and call charges, and see a boost in productivity.
Yet there remain barriers to adoption for businesses and IT departments alike.
The replacement of the central telephony system or PBX is one of the key changes that can enable a transition to UC. This is expensive, however, so the CIO is likely to wait until the PBX reaches the end of its life – in spite of the difficulty integrating with UC tools that this creates.
Secondly, few providers have been able to offer a full suite of really good collaboration tools, resulting in complex IT deployment projects and a poor user experience.
Just because an icon appears on an employee's desktop does not guarantee he or she will use that service, or benefit from it if they do. In short, UC has not been easy to use, businesses have not been able to see the benefit, and email has prevailed as the preferred communication tool.
However, things are changing. Forrester Research, for one, says most businesses will soon use UC. We are certainly seeing much more customer interest.
We see consumerisation of IT, continued focus on cost savings, and prioritising of mobile or flexible working, as well as the dominance of email, as contributing factors. Line-of-business managers can see the scope to cut overheads, reduce office size and boost customer service.
Employees want to use the same types of social and collaborative tools they use outside work, and do so seamlessly. People expect to move through email to IM to videoconferencing and do so through a familiar interface on multiple devices from any location – and that is now possible.
Few vendors could offer this five years ago, and few service providers could demonstrate successful integration.
It remains a big ask, though, to deploy a range of complex communications into one manageable, secure service. UC application suites hosted on the premises still require a sizeable capital investment and ongoing management involving considerable technical expertise.
In the past, this made the business case hard to prove. But increasingly we are finding customers turning to UC applications hosted in a private cloud and delivered to the business as a service with per-user pricing.
This obviously reduces capex and allows the CIO to focus on supporting the business rather than the IT infrastructure.
Hugo Harber is portfolio director of Colt Technology Services
You may also like
/sponsored/4039897/industry-voice-constant-life-change-last-months
Security
Industry Voice: "The only constant in life is change*", and no more so than in the last 18 months
We've seen a monumental change in how we buy, work, and communicate, and more change is afoot…
/sponsored/4035557/partner-content-voice-mobility-set-critical-services-resellers
Security
Partner Content: Voice, data and mobility set to become critical services for IT resellers
Exclusive research conducted by CRN in association with Gamma, shows how the pandemic has increased the appetite for Unified Communications