Benefits of UC?

What does it UC?

UC is emerging technology of first decade of 21st century that has been developing as the umbrella communications suite that embraces all existing separated communications tools with the aim to provide integrated communications solutions for business customers and unique customer experience regardless of networks and domain.

UC products are used to facilitate personal communications and to support workgroup and collaborative communications. Some UC products may extend outside company boundaries to enhance communications among organizations, to support interaction among organizations, to support interaction among large public communities or personal communications. Additionally UC is increasingly being integrated or offered with collaborative applications to form UC and collaboration (UCC).

UC can be seen through six broad communications product areas:

1. Voice and telephony – This area includes fixed, mobile and soft telephony, as well as the evolution of PBX’s and IP – PBXs. This include also real time communications such as video telephony.

2. Conferencing – This area includes separate voice, videoconferencing and web conferencing capabilities, as well as converged unified communications capabilities.

3. Messaging includes e-mail, which becomes indispensable business tool, voice mail and unified messaging in various forms

4. Presence and IM – These will play an increasingly central role in the next generation of communications. Presence services, in particular, are expanding to enable aggregation and publication of presence and location information from and to multiple sources, what is referred as “rich presence”.

5. Clients – Unified Clients enable access to multiple communications functions from a consistent interface. These may have different form, including thick desktop clients, thin-browser client and mobile PDA clients, as well as specialized clients embedded within business applications.

6. Communications applications – This group of applications has directly integrated communications functions. Key applications areas include consolidated administration tools, collaboration applications, contact center applications and notification applications. Eventually, other applications will be communications – enabled. When business applications are integrated with communications, Gartner calls these communications – enabled business processes (CEBPSs).

Unified Communications UC is one of the fastest growing ICT industries.

From technology perspective it is one of the most dynamic and most complex because it merges both off line communications (such an e-mail & messaging) and real time communications (such as fix voice, mobile and video) and ensure integration of powerful communications tools into classic IT business applications (such as ERP, CRM, BI etc) and building company social network platforms similar with global social networks (such as Skype, FaceBook, Twitter or so on).

Why to deploy UC?

Unified communications and collaboration solutions help to enterprises and organizations meet challenges in this demanding economic climate. By combining all your communications into a single, manageable interface, unified communications simplifies the way you share information and improves collaboration both within your organization and with customers, partners and suppliers.

Deployment choices for UC

The value of UC fundamentally comes from aligning enterprise communications capabilities to needs of the organizations, what include the ability to improve productivity, raise service metrics and reduce human latency.

The gains of UC can be much higher of new liabilities that come with introducing it. Whatever UC vendors and providers say, deployment of UC is not an easy task, because it interleaves with some of major processes within the organization.

Whether the organization will leverage the benefits of UC depend of the deployment path and to what extent the organization is able to adopt it and use it.

Larger organization with own IT staff often chose to deploy on premise solution. 

SME have many of the same business needs as their large enterprises, they require IT solutions that are developed with the specific requirements of smaller companies. SME require IT solutions that are easy to purchase, implement, and maintain, providing the needed core capabilities with the ability to add on and grow as needed or when they can afford it.

Which benefits can you reach with UC?

Unified Communications ensure many important benefits, such as:

More Effective Communications – as companies extend their operations to more locations and add workers with home offices, keeping in touch with their employees can become a challenge. The need for efficient communication and accountability continues to be the number one reason behind UC adoption.

Makes it easier to Manage Multiple Devices - UC solutions enable users to view all messages in a single messagebox, notwithstanding of the device or media channel they were originally sent from. Users are free to think about the content of a message, and their communication priorities, rather than worry about the type of device or application being used to send or receive it, and whether or not it will be accessible to the recipient in time. Since all data is stored centrally, any message or data can be accessed anytime from anywhere, even while traveling, irrespective of the device being used. Improve competitiveness – being able to communicate effectively and in time, can make the difference between success or failure. Ensuring that employees can get back to customers quickly, can exchange information with partners effectively, and have all data accessible from anywhere at anytime can provide a real differentiation in today’s business world.

Integration with Business Processes - As more UC solutions offer integration with important corporate applications, such as CRM, ERP and many others, users can quickly gain access to databases via their UC interface, or mash-ups, enabling them to provide better customer service, finish projects on time, and gain critical insights into their work.

Adoption of Related Technologies – UC also allows companies to harness the benefits of many new, emerging communication technologies, such as:

• Presence – Presence information allows users to initiate communications in their preferred way, and provides employees with a tool to better manage their work VoIP - offers great cost savings on calls, and is an integral part of any UC deployment.
• WiFi Convergence - a convergence of VoIP and WiFi, provides seamless connectivity of mobile devices to the VoIP network. It enables richer and more interactive UC communications among users with lower costs by leveraging the home, office, or roaming WiFi networks.
•  SIP - the integration of SIP enables UC vendors to provide high-quality multi-media user experiences for voice, video, chat, and other forms of communications that are interoperable. SIP has become the standard for devices like IP Phones, CPE equipment, and software, both client and server. Like email, UC technologies must be compatible with a wide range of vendors to insure ubiquitous usage across the marketplace.
• Instant Messaging with XMPP – an open standards technology that removes barriers between isolated networks, and allows interoperability.
•  Mobile access to the PBX – Full business class services like call transfer, conferencing and ―dial tone‖ access from the PBX to mobile devices.

Faster decision-making will also allow you to take advantage of new business opportunities, expanding markets, mergers and acquisitions - when they arise. In addition, by enhancing collaboration, UCC will reduce your employees’ need to travel, using less energy and slashing your carbon footprint.

Benefits for SME

Fortunately this is changing rapidly, thanks to lowering broadband connectivity costs, which make Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings accessible to businesses of all sizes. SaaS offerings bring even the most sophisticated technologies within the reach of small and medium businesses at an affordable price. Software as a Service (SaaS), is increasingly presenting an attractive way for companies of all sizes to reduce costs and simplify administration, while deploying new technologies at a fraction of the cost of in-house deployment. With SaaS, businesses no longer have to manage and maintain their own solutions in house. This frees up company resources, enabling businesses to focus on their core operations. Some of the many benefits of SaaS include:

• Smaller onsite IT staffs - hosted solutions avoid the hassles associated with setting up, running, managing, and maintaining an on-premises solution.
• Lower implementation costs - due to lower expenses for initial design, planning and set up, as well as lower licensing fees and not having to deal with hardware compatibility issues.
• Access to the most up-to-date technology – hosted solutions provide a seamless upgrade path to the latest versions, and technology without the added costs, while with on-premises solutions businesses have to continually incur the costs of staying current with the latest product releases.
• Predictable costs - hosted solutions charge on a user/month basis, which allows businesses to accurately budget their costs on an annual basis, and plan their investments accordingly.
• Flexibility – Hosted solutions can offer modular services for groups of employees e.g. mobility to the sales and executive teams, or simple messaging for logistics staff, this cuts down costs by allowing SMEs to pay only for the services they use, while providing them with the flexibly to easily sign-on and off different services.
• Stronger solutions for smaller businesses – thanks to a hosted solution, smaller businesses can typically afford to access a much more technologically advanced solution than what they would normally be able to afford to run on-premises.