If you are a CIO or a manager of an IT department for a large or small organization, Unified Communications (UC) is quickly moving towards the top of your agenda. A recent study from CDW quoted by Gary Kim on TMCnet shows that 39% of organizations surveyed are approaching UC from a rich media conferencing angle. I recently wrote a white paper that explains how Connect Pro can help organizations succeed with that approach to UC. Click here to download the white paper. Continue reading for a quick summary.
Many organizations are excited by the promise of unified communications, but they are struggling to justify the ROI of a full UC deployment. The main reason is that UC is a technology not an application. It can create some cost savings from an IT maintenance perspective but unless an organization can identify clear value at the line of business level, it will struggle defining a positive ROI for it.
The recommendation is to have a very pragmatic approach to deploy UC and take a three step approach:
1- understand which collaboration technologies are currently deployed and used in each department and identify which ones could be more globally deployed;
2- identify the technology gaps in the UC stack and invest in filling those gaps: ie if your organization does not use web conferencing or IM, invest in those first before investing in an IP-PBX: they will provide greater ROI.
3- plan for long term replacement of existing communications technologies.
Connect Pro is a collaboration solution very well suited for this approach to UC.
Connect Pro has built integration hooks into audio conferencing systems, SIP/SIMPLE or XMPP presence/IM systems, and LDAP systems. It provides unsurpassed ease of use and rich user interface that drive rapid adoption of its collaboration features. It provides a quick way for an organization to bring web 2.0 technology to their end-users.
And with future development like Cocomo or Gibraltar, it is becoming a platform to build advanced collaboration mash-up leveraging communications services from across the organization.