How Unified Communications Work

Business communications challenges can affect both profitability and customer/partner relationships, especially as employees' workspaces extend beyond the traditional desktop environment. As workers become increasingly mobile and begin to conduct business from a variety of locations, four primary challenges arise:

• Communication-caused delay and disruption
• Communications complexity affects long-term productivity, business communications process reform, and financial performance
• Decision-support outcomes suffer from inability to access and collaborate effectively with primary players
• Resources are under-used or misallocated because of the complexity of communication

The failure to address business communications challenges in the new extended workspace inflicts real penalties: A 2005 Sage Research study discovered that 22% of the organisations reported experiencing communication-caused delays on a monthly basis, while 13% said such delays happen every week.

Business communications require even more flexibility

After massive investments in technologies and devices, organisations demand ways of simplifying business communications for their mobile workforce, but also for office-based employees whose workspace has expanded to encompass conference rooms, whole campuses and warehouses.  Companies must improve communication flows, so that employees can access decision makers quickly, enhance collaboration, and improve productivity.

Companies that can flexibly and productively manage business communications in a distributed environment:

• Extend the workspace beyond its traditional desktop-bound limitations
• Speed access and improve communication
• Dramatically improve collaboration
• Streamline business processes, reach the right resource more quickly, and enhance profitability

Generation-e implements unified communications solutions from Microsoft, Tandberg and 3Com to provide an integrated communications strategy and architecture, helping enable the secure combination of voice, video, data and mobility applications within an integrated and intelligent network. They support employees' ability to collaborate every time, everywhere and where everyone's included.

Business communications benefits add up

As unified communications applications become more prevalent in the extended workspace, more organisations are also realising the associated benefits. Results documented by Sage Research demonstrate a multitude of benefits—both in terms of employee time savings and financial savings.

Unified business communications applications not only facilitate productivity improvements for employees wherever their work takes them, they can also enhance the way in which all employees communicate.

• Organisations using unified communications clients saved an average of 32 minutes daily per employee because presence technology enabled staff to reach one another on the first try – no more phone tag!
• Use of softphones resulted in an average savings of $1,727 per month in mobile phones.  Mobile workers also saved 40 minutes each day, enjoyed greater communications convenience, and generated annual productivity gains of 3.5 days per year through business continuity impact.
• Organisations using unified messaging reported that employees saved 43 minutes per day from more efficient message management while mobile workers saved 55 minutes per day.
• Companies using integrated voice and web conferencing reported a 30 percent reduction in conferencing expenses (by making integrated conferencing capabilities available in-house and on-network) and an average savings of $1,700 per month in travel costs.
• For others, the savings may simply come from having reduced hardware requirements and operating expenses.

And in today's dynamic business environment, perhaps the most important benefit comes from having a communications system that can change and grow at a moment's notice, enabling new capabilities for more effective business communications, employee mobility, streamlining business processes, and improving profitability.