The Promise of Unified Communications

By Kathleen Ayres, Product Marketing Manager, InfoVista

Communication technologies in the workplace have changed dramatically over the past couple of decades. What started as an environment where most employees were tied to their desks has evolved into a mobile and geographically dispersed workforce due to advances in communications technology (corporate and private e-mail, SMS texting, instant messaging, Skype, voice mail…to name a few).

The speed and ease with which a workforce can communicate, share information, and collaborate is having a greater impact on the bottom line of every enterprise. Therefore, businesses are looking for ways to improve the overall quality and speed of interactions, ways to enhance individual and group productivity, as well as to reduce communications costs.

Unified Communications (UC) provides an answer to these needs. UC offers the promise of simplified business communication, enhanced productivity, and reduced costs by eliminating boundaries between fixed-line phones, mobile devices, and messaging systems.

Currently, analysts are seeing an increased interest by enterprises in UC. Although the VoIP market was affected by the global economic recession in 2008 and 2009, as were most industries, analysts are now seeing a recovery trend, which is expected to continue to grow. Overall, the market for combined managed and hosted VoIP/UC services is expected to have a compound annual growth rate of approximately 9% for the 2010-2014 time period. Analysts are reporting an especially positive outlook for the hosted VoIP/UC service model (12%CAGR for Hosted vs. about a 5% for the Managed IP PBX model for this same time period).  So, it appears that the greatest momentum will be for hosted VoIP services.

In fact, Cisco recently expanded on its UC solutions including the Cius (industry’s first mobile business collaboration tablet),  as well as its Hosted Collaboration solution, both announced at Cisco Live! Las Vegas this past June.

While the promises and benefits of UC are great, it’s important to keep in mind that deploying UC technologies and services is no simple task, regardless of the choice of UC provider (managed service provider, hosted service provider, or the enterprise itself). Each must address a common set of challenges and requirements associated with ensuring high-quality UC services, including:

• Keeping the quality of the user experience high and maintaining each customer’s expected service levels
• Monitoring a complex and interdependent UC infrastructure
• Properly managing and reporting on the many customers serviced in the managed or hosted UC services environment
• Getting visibility into the service performance delivered to a specific business’s organizational hierarchy – their divisions and locations
• Understanding changing utilization patterns for effective service growth and resource planning

In considering the potential UC services offer, you can’t help but imagine a world where you’d spend more time communicating and less time managing those communications. However, in order to get there, the ability to ensure a quality user experience will prove vital to the success of the UC services delivered—and effective performance management becomes a critical requirement.

I welcome your thoughts!