Search for “unified communications” on Google and you will find over five million pages, many of which are about the underlying technology. But at its heart, unified communications (UC) is all about a set of simple, clear business benefits.
Unified communications now
How many times have you noticed colleagues making calls from their desks using their mobiles? According to a Mitel survey, 48 per cent of business people do this - and you can imagine the expense this incurs.
So why do people do this? The answer is that the mobile phone offers a good experience for getting hold of someone. With a modern smartphone, you can call, text, or even email someone from the same contacts page. It’s easier, quicker – but not cheaper.
Unified communications aims to make desktop calls as friction-free and easy to handle as a smartphone – but in a way that’s more cost effective and powerful. It’s really all about bringing together your phone calls, voicemail, instant messaging, video, and most importantly contacts into a single easy to use and effective system.
It allows you to focus on the person you want to get hold of, not the complexities of how you get hold of them. One example of this is a UC system’s ability to deal with “presence”. You can easily see colleagues’ availability and how they prefer to be contacted from an on-screen ‘buddy list’, making phone calls, instant messaging, or even a video call available at the click of a mouse or push of a button.
A typical unified communications system focuses on reducing the difficulties of contacting someone, making it easier to get hold of them in a way that suits the person as well as you. For example, you can set your availability to receive calls based on your current activity, so if you’re in the middle of writing an important document you can receive messages via email, voicemail or IM instead of your phone ringing constantly. You can also see colleagues’ availability at a glance before you try and call them, reducing voicemail tag and wasted time on missed calls.
Future-proofing
Unified Communications systems use the same core technology as the internet (IP, or Internet Protocol). This means innovative new communications capabilities can easily be added, in contrast with the complex and costly upgrades required for traditional phone systems.
And for most companies, UC can be undertaken as a journey rather than a single big jump. You can first focus on implementing the aspects of UC that cut costs. For example, because unified communications systems make use of a single network for voice and data, you have one piece of infrastructure to maintain, rather than two.
Next, you can add Presence systems on top of this new infrastructure, allowing your employees – and importantly, your customers – to communicate in a more effective way. And finally, you can continue to upgrade your systems with new services as and when the need arises.
The architects’ story
One company which has benefited from both immediate cost savings and future proofing when using a unified communications system is international architectural practice Renton Howard Wood Levin (RHWL). RHWL took advantage of an office move to look at its communications systems, and a move to UC.
Working with BT, RHWL’s team used the planning and design phases of the move to fully tailor their system to the new environment, while the BT team ran a number of workshops to understand what individual users needed.
The simplicity of the resulting system adds to the financial benefits for RHWL. Using IP telephony means there are half the number of network points because the PCs connect to the network via the telephones, saving space and money on cabling.
RHWL’s IT director Dave Allerton sums up: “Overall it’s more cost effective having a converged network. Our call costs are down by probably 30 per cent on the same period last year. Support costs have also been reduced because it’s a much more reliable system and much easier to manage – and it’s very convenient getting it all from one supplier. We hope in the future to extend the solution to serve our Berlin office too.”
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