What is Unified Communications?

Unified Communications (UC) brings together multiple real-time and offline communication modes (such as telephony, email, fax, and instant messaging) plus a range of additional capabilities (including presence detection and click-to-call) into a single, integrated solution. With UC solutions, users can access and manage all of their communications tools from a single environment, regardless of their location.

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Typically, UC solutions capitalise on Internet Protocol (IP) technology to transmit voice, video, and data across a single network. By eliminating the need for multiple, disparate networks, UC solutions can reduce costs and simplify administration.

How Can UC Help My Company?

UC solutions can deliver several key benefits for organizations:

IP telephony—a key component of any UC solution—provides a cost-effective alternative to expensive toll call services. UC solutions also can help organizations cut additional costs by converging multiple communication modes over a single, shared IT network. Organisations can reduce capital expenditures and minimize operating expenses by eliminating the need to buy and manage multiple, independent systems for telephony, collaboration, and more.

UC solutions help boost business productivity by improving the efficiency of communications and collaboration. With a UC solution, a salesperson can locate contact information for a potential customer, place a call, and share documents with that customer all through a few mouse clicks. A geographically distributed team can use conferencing and document collaboration capabilities to work together to complete a project rapidly.

An organisation can use the same capabilities to provide multimedia training inexpensively to workers in regional offices. Call center agents can use presence detection capabilities to find subject-matter experts fast and then use instant messaging to confer with those experts, all while assisting customers in real time.

With UC solutions, employees gain the tools they need to work anywhere, with any
device, at any time. The mobility offered by UC solutions enables organizations to extend the work environment beyond the traditional office and desktop. Remote workers can log in to a UC system on the road and have at their fingertips all the same capabilities that they have on site. This includes seeing co-workers’ presence online, as well as having access to instant messaging, conferencing, and collaboration capabilities.

What Size Businesses Can Benefit from UC Solutions?

UC solutions can help organisations of all sizes, from small businesses to large-scale global enterprises. Small companies can eliminate the costs of owning and operating a traditional phone system while accessing enterprise-class tools that help improve competitiveness. Despite having limited IT resources, small businesses can more easily manage internal and external communications systems with UC. Large organisations can enhance the efficiency of business processes, improve collaboration among geographically distributed teams, and generate telephony cost savings commensurate with the scale of their communications infrastructure. And by consolidating the infrastructure required for multiple modes of communication, UC can help organizations of all sizes access a broad range of tools while streamlining IT administration.

Is My Company Ready for UC?

Assess your company’s readiness for UC so you can select the right solution and enhance the efficiency of deployment planning. Define how you will use the solution and evaluate whether your IT infrastructure will need a refresh to support a new solution.

Before you embark on finding an appropriate UC solution, determine your business needs. Some organisations will want to focus on enhancing the productivity of individuals by implementing new capabilities such as instant messaging, presence detection, or click-to-call. Other organisations need ways to eliminate bottlenecks, such as business workflows. In many cases, organizations benefit from first concentrating on individual productivity and then later identifying opportunities for business process optimisation.

Successful deployment of a UC solution depends on careful evaluation of your technical preparedness. For example, is your network ready? The infrastructure must be capable of delivering sufficient throughput and meeting latency, jitter, and packet-loss requirements. Ask potential vendors whether they offer network assessment tools and services, which can help determine whether your network is prepared to support IP telephony and other real-time UC applications.