Unified communications can help address the challenge today's organisations face as they contend with increasingly complex environments that feature a wide array of communications methods. Employees, business partners, and customers now conduct business using seemingly infinite combinations of phones, voice messaging, e-mail, fax, mobile clients, and rich-media conferencing. Without unified communications, however, these tools are often not used as effectively as they could be. The result is information overload and misdirected communications that delay decisions, slow down processes, and reduce productivity.
Unified Communications Evolves
As precursors to unified communications, IP telephony and IP communications solutions have proven their ability to help solve such problems, enabling organisations to streamline business processes and reduce costs. For years, companies have realised the benefits that carrying voice, data, and video communications across a common, IP infrastructure can bring.
From these, unified communications solutions have evolved and offer even greater benefits. Unified communications applications are actually integrated within an IP network to provide structure and intelligence that can help organisations integrate their communications more closely with business processes, and ensure information reaches recipients quickly, through the most appropriate medium.
Business Value's
Within the current economic situation, businesses are looking at further ways to save costs and cut carbon emissions. Unified communications helps organisations reduce the operating costs of travel, telecom and IT, whilst improving employee productivity and ensuring business's maintain their competitive edge.
Reduced Travel and Training Costs
Web and videoconferencing, as well as other unified communications (UC) products, connect participants with meetings or "events" where they do not need to be physically present. Internal & external meetings, training and staff performance reviews are activities that frequently require less travel after deploying a UC solution. Using UC solutions to deliver training to employees through their desktops provides savings in areas of travel, specific training costs, and loss of productivity through travel times. It also allows for employees to more flexible in scheduling meetings, and collaborating within their teams
By utilising technologies such as presence, awareness, IP telephony and video conferencing, organisations can utilise home working initiatives, and expand geographically with more ease, often making a saving on office space, and improving space utilization
By utilising Voice over IP "VOIP" organisations can take advantage of their existing IP based networks to connect remote office, and field based worker's to the current PBX, regardless of if they are IP based PBX's or traditional TDM based PBX's. This will reduce costs of having voice and video having to break out onto public PSTN's