value

Clarifying the UC Vision

Unified Communications is still in its infancy more or less. Vendors are still fighting to define what UC even is, and to declare their stake in the industry. Some vendors are traditional voice or network infrastructure hardware vendors that are trying to extend into software and application integration. Some vendors are software developers and application integrators who are working to develop or incorporate voice and network hardware. But, what *really* defines UC?

Joe Schurman, Founder and CEO of Evangelyze Communications and a respected VoIP and UC visionary, explores this question in a recent blog post. Actually, Schurman’s post starts off as more of a vent against what he perceives as current marketing and sales efforts missing the mark. Essentially, Schurman feels that vendors are too focused on feature comparisons and ’selling’ the underlying technology. Schurman says he believes that “…what will actually make a difference to people is how the technology can be integrated, how it can affect the business applications they use today…”

I agree with Joe. Enterprises like Cisco, Nortel, Avaya, IBM, and Microsoft should all know that one of the most fundamental rules of sales is that you “sell the ’sizzle’, not the bacon.” In other words, ultimately what matters is how the product or service will benefit the company. What value will that product or service provide the customer? There are those within an organization who may care what protocol is being used, or the operating system that the product runs on, or how the  technical architecture is put together behind the scenes. All of those things will need to be known and understood at some point, but they are not compelling reasons to buy or not to buy a given solution.

Joe sums it up in his blog post “The CEO of a company does not care about whether dual forking is obtained through two components or one.  The CEO of a company wants to know if he or she is saving cost and will be impressed if the solution can integrate into the company’s business strategy, the process, and the underlying applications that support this strategy that have been custom-built by an internal staff.” The bottom line is that an investment in UC helps an enterprise to operate more efficiently. Operating more efficiently translates to reduced travel and communications costs as well as enabling companies to trim costs in other business processes. Operating more efficiently means that the organization can innovate faster than competitors and respond quickly to changes in the market.

The Value of VoIP

For new companies or old companies building new facilities, the value of VoIP is easier to define and the return on investment can be realized much quicker. Deploying only one infrastructure- the network infrastructure- for voice and data, rather than an IP network for data and separate wiring and infrastructure for voice presents immediate cost savings. For existing businesses, the value is still there, but removing and replacing an already present voice network is a harder sell in terms of ROI. As this article points out, there is value in VoIP, but businesses need to look carefully at the costs of licensing and the actual handset phones they will need. More importantly, to more accurately determine the value or ROI, the business needs to look not just at the ‘now’, but also project how they will grow and expand over the next 2 to 3 years and what the additional investment will be. On the other hand, VoIP is not an island an the sum total of the value of VoIP does not rest in the VoIP itself. VoIP is also a stepping stone to more comprehensive and robust unified communications solutions which can make the business more efficient and boost productivity, increasing the value of VoIP even further.

Quantifying the Value of UC

The features and benefits of unified communications sound great, but for most businesses you have to be able to demonstrate and quantify the actual return on investment. The fact that it is “very cool” does little for the bottom line. But, what if you could tell the CFO, or the Board of Directors that it will reduce the cost of communications by 10%, or that employee productivity will go up by 10%, or that customer satisfaction will increase by 21%? That might make a more solid case for UC. A recent study by Dimension Data shows just that. For more about the Dimension Data study, check out this article from Customer Strategy magazine.