Unified Communications and Your Business: The Myths, the Market Drivers and What You Need to Know

UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS AND
YOUR BUSINESSThe Myths, the Market Drivers and What You Need to Know
EXECUTIVE SUMMARYTo create a consistent, seamless Uni?ed Communications (UC) experience across your organization, you must ?rst examine your existing infrastructure and business processes to determine what components will work best for your business. What processes are you trying to streamline or simplify? How can UC make your business run more smoothly and your workers be more productive? Do you have the right infrastructure in place to accommodate the applications and services that will bene?t your business the most? This paper provides an overview of the potential bene?ts of UC and discusses some key considerations you should keep in mind when mapping out your UC strategy.
UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONSWhat is it? You may think of a laundry list of applications and capabilities related to your business-technologies like IP telephony, presence, messaging, email, and videoconferencing, to name a few. But it is more than that. Uni?ed Communications is an ecosystem consisting of multiple components of business capabilities, and the result is communication delivered in real-time, based on how you want it, where you want it and when you need it.
The promise of Uni?ed Communications is powerful. But implementing Uni?ed Communications across Ayour enterprise requires tremendous ?exibility and pa lot of forethought. For example, you may need to Presencee praccommodate a range of hardware and a wide variety MobilityMessagingsuof applications and services. While some services can t &cbe provided on-premise, particularly in larger companies u Swhere IT resources are plentiful, others need to be UCTelephonyEcosystem Collaborationr ethosted off-site. Many smaller companies that lack IT rs varesources rely solely on Software as a Service (SaaS) ir cfproviders to deliver the communications services they VideoConferencingenrequire. In short, what works best for one business may ContactI sSolutionsnot work best for yours. It is critical to ?rst examine your existing infrastructure and business processes to determine what components will work best for your business before you execute your UC implementation.
Copyright © 2009 Qwest. All Rights Reserved. Not to be distributed or reproduced by anyone other than Qwest entities. 1All marks are the property of the respective company. April 2009ONE-STOP COMMUNICATIONS DASHBOARD DELIVERS CONSISTENCY AND CONVENIENCEDeploying Uni?ed Communications sets the stage for businesses to improve processes, increase collaboration and productivity, and simplify communications. The concept of UC is gaining wide acceptance. Key drivers include the need to minimize the communications latency and the need to maximize effectiveness and ef?ciencies in every day business transactions. Users want a consistent look and feel across their communications software-whether they're emailing, instant messaging or looking up contact information for a co-worker or colleague.
Today when a worker wants to communicate with a co-worker, he must either send an email and wait for a response, or place a phone call and hope the other person answers. If the co-worker is unavailable by phone, the caller must leave a message and wait for a return call. This process is slow and inef?cient, and can cause long delays in response times. Critical projects or issues are often put on hold as workers fail to communicate in a timely fashion.
With Uni?ed Communications, workers can access all of their communications applications through a single communications dashboard. For example, a worker may open an email in Outlook, click on the email, and check presence information on the spot. With UC, he will be able to see whether the other worker is available by phone. He can instantly open a chat session and request a meeting, or click to dial over an IP connection. Or, if the worker is unavailable, information about his whereabouts is displayed. UC has the ability to connect people rapidly using better, timelier information, and it facilitates better response times, faster decision making and enhanced collaboration.
SMOOTHER WORKFLOW OFFERS PRODUCTIVITY GAINSUC isn't tied only to your email environment; it actually uni?es multiple environments-email, IM, phone, videoconferencing, document review and more-into a single, easy to use environment. For example, y... [download for more]