Can the Unified Communication solution really save costs?

Many enterprises are favored for the low cost features of the Unified Communication solution. However, some people disagree. Some people found a lot of problems when deploying the Unified Communication solution. The low cost features are questionable, and the system is also incompatible. Is this true? Let's take a look at what the article says.

Unified Communication can bring unprecedented convenience for communication and collaboration. The Basic Unified Communication solution can provide real-time communication systems such as instant messages and information sharing of non-real-time systems such as email and voice mail, these systems can also be integrated into the same network platform. More advanced Unified Communication solutions allow users to access all communication and information systems through a single simple interface or console.

The recession has slowed down

For enterprise users, the advantages of Unified Communication are obvious: from an internal perspective, Unified Communication can improve the efficiency of communication and collaboration between employees and departments and improve productivity; from an external perspective, unified Communication can improve customer service quality and customer satisfaction. At the same time, as the cornerstone of Unified Communication, VoIP technology can also significantly reduce users' communication costs, while voice or video conferencing can reduce users' business travel expenses.

The emergence of Consumer Community network platforms such as Facebook, Flikr, and Twitter has also stimulated employees' desire to communicate with each other, to a large extent, it promotes the demand for a unified communication system.

However, the Unified Communication Technology Market has not seen any expected growth since this year. So what is the reason for the "don't scream" Situation of Unified Communication Technology? Industry analysts believe that this may be largely due to the shrinking of corporate IT spending caused by the global overall economic recession. "Although the Unified Communication solution that can integrate voice mail, email and mobile systems has obvious advantages, unfortunately, the current economic situation limits the possibility of deploying such systems." Said the technical director of a household appliance chain distribution enterprise.

According to a survey conducted by Forrester on 466 companies, nearly half of them shelved the Unified Communication solution Investment Plan mainly because of a shortage of funds. This shows that the current development of the Unified Communication Market is mainly subject to the current economic situation.

High deployment and operation costs

Unified Communication supports data and voice traffic transmission based on a single infrastructure, which simplifies network connections and provides information sharing for employees using different devices. The integration of voice mail and email and the provision of instant messages or file sharing in video conferences are simple examples of Unified Communication applications.

A video conferencing system that provides Telepresence is an example of a Unified Communication advanced application. Cisco's Telepresence system is a representative of such technologies. This technology can connect to video conference rooms of ten sites and provide participants with an immersive experience while providing interactive data sharing support.

At present, the biggest obstacle to such technologies lies in the relatively high deployment and operation costs. In fact, this is also a common problem facing most systems of Unified Communication Solutions. If a 6-person telepresence conference room costs more than $0.3 million, and a 15-site system is deployed, the monthly network cost alone is as high as $10 thousand.

Traditional user habits

In fact, the development of the unified communication market is still largely subject to people's daily communication methods. Some Insiders pointed out that for enterprises, Unified Communication is a project that depends on the planning and deployment of users rather than IT departments.

For the enterprise IT department, the Unified Communication solution is also a highly technical challenge, and may face challenges that have never been encountered before, such as voice and data integration. However, in essence, communication is more of a kind of personal behavior. Forcing employees to change their daily communication methods may face great challenges. Therefore, in this sense, as a new type of communication and assistance technology, Unified Communication also faces problems such as whether employees are willing to accept and whether they are willing to change their original communication methods, this also means that the development of the unified communication market cannot be achieved overnight, and may require a long-term and gradual market cultivation process.

Business Value and expected benefits

Looking at the commercial value and expected benefits of Unified Communication is also an important reason for some enterprises to delay the deployment of a Unified Communication System.

Henry Dewing, Chief Analyst of Forrester Research, pointed out that unified communication can improve the efficiency of communication and collaboration and other "soft benefits" that are difficult to quantify cannot be the reason to attract enterprises to deploy such systems, this is especially true when the current economic downturn and enterprise IT overhead are tight.

In fact, enterprises that have deployed a Unified Communication system do not feel that they are not able to achieve the expected profitability. For example, in the Forrester investigation, 24% of the communications and network administrators of enterprises that have deployed a Unified Communication System, they do not seem to realize all the expected benefits promised by the Unified Communication System, while another 11% of respondents said they did not know whether they had received the expected benefits from the Unified Communication System.

H. b. steven John, Technical Director of Fuller, believes that the reason for this situation is not only that the Unified Communication Solution Provider is exaggerating and misleading, it may also be caused by the rashness of enterprises in making Unified Communication System investment decisions, lack of necessary arguments and clear goals. Although Microsoft's SharePoint document sharing and collaboration systems are "very interesting and attractive", John said, does some companies really need such systems? Can such systems bring them a competitive advantage ?" Before these problems are clarified, investing in a unified communication system will inevitably encounter problems that fail to achieve the expected benefits, or at least all the expected benefits. Therefore, John believes that for enterprises planning to deploy a unified communication system, it is essential to clarify the deployment and operation costs of the Unified Communication solution and the actual benefits that can be brought, computing and comparison between the network bandwidth required to be increased by deploying the Unified Communication technology, as well as the resulting network operation costs and the expected benefits of the Unified Communication, it is not difficult to come to the conclusion that a unified communication system is needed or worth deploying.