Cisco employees have many ways to contact people and share information worldwide using collaboration tools to make finding the right person easy.

“Recently when I had to travel to Bogotá, Colombia, I used new Cisco unified communications capabilities to keep in touch and remain productive. Customers who called my office number could reach me no matter where I was: at the hotel, the office, or wherever I was in Colombia. My customers never had to wonder where I was, because I was always available and could support them regardless of my location,” says Steven Craven, a Cisco consulting system engineer in Nashville, Tennessee.

Cisco has more than 90,000 employees and contractors working together at 300 sites worldwide. These workers have 90,000 IP phones, 45,000 software IP phones, 40,000 mobile phones, and 70,000 voice-mail boxes. Employees use instant messaging, desktop video and TelePresence, Cisco Unified MeetingPlace and WebEx Meeting Center, and Web-based tools such as e-mail, wikis, file-share servers, and WebEx Connect to collaborate and share information.

A recent survey of more than 3500 Cisco employees in our Network Enhanced Workspace environment (see below) indicates that these tools are transforming the way Cisco employees, and particularly the sales force, do business. The more than 1100 responses shows that the Cisco Unified Communications solution is ultimately helping employees to unify their workspaces (regardless of operating system, location, application or device) to save time and increase productivity.

The employee survey revealed that the average Cisco employee spends approximately 15 minutes per day "playing phone tag" with customers and business colleagues. Another 13 minutes per day is spent calling multiple devices to locate an individual. Once employees have reached each other, they spend an average 12 minutes setting up meetings and conference calls each day.

To fully enable Sales to use what they and sell what they use, Cisco IT has deployed the latest unified communications tools to Sales and other employees in a parallel production environment called the Network Enhanced Workspace (NEW). These tools include Cisco Unified Personal Communicator, Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator, Cisco Unified Mobility, Cisco Unity, and Cisco Unified MeetingPlace. To support new mobility capabilities, IT upgraded select mobile phone users to support dual-mode (wireless LAN and cellular) communications. Together these tools enable the Cisco employees in the NEW environment to reach each other quickly and easily, as well as share information.

The Cisco IT survey of employees in the NEW environment shows how unified communications can immediately contribute to business productivity. Within the first few weeks of usage, 80 percent of users had overwhelmingly positive responses to the new capabilities (“I can see a real benefit here”), and 22 percent noticed their personal productivity increase (“It has made my daily work experience much better or more efficient”). This personal productivity increase comes from several key applications including mobility, presence and a unified client, Web collaboration, and unified messaging.

Mobility: Communicating in the Mobile Workspace

Cisco unified communications mobility products include Unified Mobile Communicator and Cisco Unified Mobility for single number reach and dual-mode capabilities. Both these products played a key role in improving productivity. When surveyed on how much productive time they gained each week from using presence, visual voice mail, corporate directory access, click-to-dial, and conference notification capabilities by using the Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator client on their mobile phones, Cisco employees in NEW reported an average savings of approximately 17 minutes per day with many “power” users indicating savings of more than five hours per week.

Employees estimated that the single number reach and the single business voice-mail features saved them on average approximately 20 minutes per day. More than 40 percent reported that Cisco Unified Mobility made their daily work experience much better or more efficient.

Approximately 19 percent of Cisco employees in NEW said that being able to use their dual mode phones as both mobile and IP wireless phones made their daily work experiences much better or more efficient. Another 41 percent responded that “I can see a real benefit here.”

Presence and Unified Client Streamline Communications

Employees in NEW reported that the Cisco Unified Personal Communicator unified client for Macintosh and PC systems saved them on average about 17 minutes per day, and about 20 percent of early users said that Cisco Unified Personal Communicator made their daily work experience much better or more efficient. Personal Communicator is a software-based IP phone on the laptop which allows employees to use their laptops as both a portable office desktop and a portable office phone. Cisco Unified Personal Communicator integrates presence, phone calls, voice messaging, and instant messaging into a single tool, making access to people and information fast and easy. Presence status information provides employees the ability to know ahead of time if a business associate is available.

Web Collaboration for Efficiency and Impact

Cisco employees in NEW said Cisco Unified MeetingPlace 6.0 (with optional video conference support) saved them on average approximately 10 minutes per week. Because most users already had access to Unified MeetingPlace voice and Web collaboration, the difference in productivity gains was not as significant as in other product areas. Having access to integrated Unified MeetingPlace Web collaboration from IM (Unified Personal Communicator) saved an additional 10 minutes per day. Many survey respondents commented that they liked the ability to set up a video conference as quickly as an audio conference with Cisco Unified MeetingPlace, especially with the mobile scheduling option. They also noted that integrated video will likely prove to be even more effective as more and more people incorporate it into their everyday collaboration toolkit. Twenty-five percent of the respondents said a desktop video solution would enable them to avoid travel.

Unified Messaging Delivers Easy Access to Voice Mail

Employees in NEW estimate that Cisco Unity 5.0 saves them an average 13 minutes per day, and 18 percent of those surveyed say (Cisco Unity 5.0) “has made my daily work experience much better or more efficient." Cisco Unity 5.0 voice messaging integrates with Microsoft Outlook, IBM Lotus Notes, and other integrated e-mail packages, enabling employees to retrieve voice-mail messages from the same inbox that they use for their e-mail messages. This is significant, because 33 percent say they use Cisco Unity “continually throughout the day,” and another 30 percent say that they use it “multiple times per day.”

Next Steps

Cisco IT is aggressively extending the business transformation benefits of unified communications throughout Cisco. Cisco IT has already begun the phased deployment of UC products including Unity 7.0, Cisco Unified personal Communicator 7.0 . Most users should be able to experience the rich functionalities of UC by end of FY09Q2.

As Cisco IT deploys unified communications tools to employees worldwide, it can put Cisco experience into practice with customers, partners, and developers. In this way, Cisco IT can learn how to streamline the deployment process to make support more robust, end-user training more effective, and system updates easier for employees to embrace. These lessons are collected and made available on the Cisco on Cisco website. And employees’ ideas to improve the products themselves are communicated back to the product development groups that develop future products.

For More Information

Cisco IT Unified Communications Solutions
Cisco on Cisco