Unified Communications Extends The Workspace

Unified communications can help address the challenge today's organizations face as they contend with increasingly complex environments and increasingly mobile workers using a wide array of communications methods from an array of locations.

Employees, business partners, and customers now conduct business using seemingly infinite combinations of voice, video, data, and mobility network applications. They work in a variety of locations, whether from their desks, in conferences rooms, in airports, warehouses, or vehicles. Without unified communications, however, these applications 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 enabled organizations to streamline business processes and reduce costs. For years, companies have realized 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 to create a workspace in which communications users can choose how and when to be connected and available. Besides helping organizations integrate their communications more closely with business processes, unified communications ensures that information reaches recipients quickly, through the most appropriate medium, no matter where they may be working or what device they may be using.

Unified communications allows businesses to collaborate in real time using advanced applications from an integrated, easy-to-use interface. These applications include:

• Video conferencing
• Integrated voice and Web conferencing
• Mobile IP soft phones
• Voicemail, and more
• Database access and queries
• Customer information

Unified Communications Benefits

Unified communications solutions can save time and help control costs, while improving productivity and competitiveness:

• In a 2005 Sage Research study, 86% of companies using unified communications reported that productivity benefits have grown.
• More than 60% reported savings of three or more hours per week for each mobile worker.

Such studies confirm that migrating to a unified communications system provides a substantial return on investment (ROI) and a reduced total cost of ownership. It also helps companies give their employees access to the information they need and the ability to collaborate no matter where their work takes them.