deployment

Using the Cloud to Accelerate UC Deployment

I will start by simply quoting from the presentation and letting it speak for itself:

Unified communications (UC) has been the main focus of the VoIP industry over the last few years. And over the last twelve months or so cloud computing has become a big driver of enterprise software. The big transition for UC over the last year was its transition to software. So, if you believe that UC is a software market, and most people believe that, and you believe software is moving to the cloud, then the next step is that UC is moving into the cloud.

You can check out the slides from this Smoothstone / TechTarget webcast by clicking here: Using Cloud Computing to Accelerate Your UC Deployment

Building a Successful UC Strategy

I recently wrote an article about taking a step-by-step, “eat the elephant one bite at a time” approach to unified communications. Unified communications is a hot concept with almost ‘Holy Grail’ like expectations for many companies. It certainly has the ability to cut costs, improve productivity, increase efficiency and more, but it takes some upfront planning to get it right.

Jamie Ryan, Senior Vice President of IT and Chief Information Officer of Aspect, wrote this eWeek.com article about building a successful unified communications strategy which similarly stresses that “evaluating the technology necessary for a rollout and developing a timeline is key to the success of any UC strategy.”

Ryan goes on to discuss the need to assess the underlying network infrastructure to make sure it is capable of providing the bandwidth and quality necessary for unified communications and upgrading the network if need be.

The article provides an interesting and informative look at the approach that Aspect took to planning and deploying unified communications internally. The process followed by Aspect can help you to understand the sorts of questions that should be considered and pitfalls to avoid as you explore implementing unified communications for your organization.

Unified Communications Defies Economic Trends

You have probably noticed that the economy isn’t doing so hot. Microsoft announced the first round of job cuts in the company’s history. Tens of thousands more job cuts were announced just this week from trusted and reliable entities such as Home Depot and Sprint. Companies that aren’t cutting employees are still freezing salaries, shelving projects, and looking for ways to cut costs.

Fortunately for unified communications, investing in a unified communications project is a pathway to reducing operational expenses and cutting costs. Perhaps that explains why companies that have stopped spending on everything from travel to paper clips are still considering investments in unified communications.

A CDW survey of 766 unified communications IT professionals found that 61% of the respondents feel that unified communications allows their organization to accomplish more with less and increase productivity while reducing costs. Implementation is ongoing for 20% of the respondents, and 33% report that they are actively planning for imminent deployment projects. Combined with the 6% who reported a complete unified communications deployment is already in place, that means that 59% of the respondents either have, or are still actively pursuing unified communications even with the faltering economy.

Unified Communications, Step by Step

In the February 2009 issue of Redmond Magazine there is a feature article I authored on unified communications. The article, Unified Communications, Step by Step, discusses strategies for implementing unified communications. It talks about the modularity of unified communications components and taking the project one phase at a time, and covers a few specific scenarios as examples of how to approach a unified communications deployment. The concepts are fairly vendor-agnostic, but the scenarios and examples are Microsoft-centric such as how to build on Exchange 2007 SP1 or OCS 2007 to add unified communications functionality one step at a time.