Virtualization

Surviving the Recession: Top 5 Ways UC Can Help

Shrinking or stagnant budgets are keeping many companies from taking the leap and investing in a full-fledge UC implementation. Do your part to ensure you’re spending the smartest IT dollars you can by attending this Virtual Seminar, “Unified Communications: A Good Investment in a Down Economy” to find out why right now is the best time to invest in UC - without having to take time out of the office.

Greater productivity, decreased costs and rapid ROI top the list of the promises of unified communications. However, as budgets shrink, companies are finding it harder to justify the costs. In this Virtual Seminar, you’ll learn why a smart investment in UC now can immediately save your company money and give you the competitive edge you’ve been looking for.

Pre-register today:

http://go.techtarget.com/r/7261504/5421719

Using Virtual Meetings to Fight Recessions and Pandemics

Companies love to have meetings. In my experience, the bigger the company, the more they like to meet. While working for a Fortune 100 IT services company I once had more than 20 hours of my work week filled with recurring meetings. In other words, more than half of my available time each week was spent meeting about what to do instead of going and doing it.

One of the reasons companies like meetings is that there is an assumption that there is some greater camaraderie or synergy developed from the face to face interaction. Do you know what else is greater in a face to face interaction? Germs. Meetings are typically in enclosed spaces and involve handshaking, sharing documents, and other physical interactions that can result in spreading germs.

Some meetings are just local team meetings, but often customers, vendors, partners, or managers fly in from across the country or around the world to participate in meetings. Those trips incur travel costs, lodging, meals, rental cars, etc. Hopefully some Earth-shattering information is covered at the meeting to justify the costs.

In this time of economic recession and with the emerging threat of the potential pandemic of H1N1 (swine flu), organizations should re-examine the value provided by these face to face meetings. The fact is, the same meeting can be conducted and the same results achieved without the travel or germs. Joe Schurman agrees with this mentality in his recent post Swine Flu + Recession = Microsoft Office Live Meeting.

Unified Communications Can Save Planet Earth

That is my sort of ‘Twitter-friendly’ way of restating the message from the recent report by the WWF (No. Not the Hulk Hogan WWF- the World Wrestling Federation. The report is from the other WWF - the World Wildlife Fund). In a report titled Virtual Meetings and Climate Innovation in the 21st Century, the WWF describes how the increasing adoption of video conferencing and other virtual meeting technologies reduces the carbon output and helps save the environment.

Many organizations are cutting back on travel and leveraging unified communications to enhance their ability to meet and collaborate in real-time no matter where in the world the participants might be. Granted, most are doing so for purely fiscal reasons rather than environmental altruism. Travel is expensive and the economy is hurting many companies. But, the result is the same.

The GreenBiz.com blog though points out that there is still significant room for improvement. They cite “concerns about effectiveness of the technology; limited access to bandwidth and equipment; weak vendor incentives to push large-scale use; misalignment of user incentives and; a lack of strategic impetus in many organizations; and poor information about the benefits” as factors behind the slow adoption of these technologies.

The combined message then is this: we are headed in the right direction, but we have a ways to go and we could be going faster. Unified communications helps organizations operate more efficiently and save money in a variety of ways. As a bonus to the benefits inherent in unified communications, it also reduces carbon emissions and helps save the planet. Seems like a win-win.

Cut Travel Expenses With Unified Communications

Businesses spend a tremendous amount of money on travel expenses. I am not just referring to ridiculous, stupid, borderline criminal travel expenses like the $440,000 insurance giant AIG spent to send 10 executives to a luxury spa after borrowing $85 Billion from US taxpayers (or the $343,000 they subsequently spent and tried to hide for another luxury trip after begging for an additional $40 Billion from the government). No- that is an extreme example where the company should actually lose all of their customers and executives should be held financially and criminally liable for exhibiting such brazen disregard for common sense.

So, AIG aside, let’s talk about normal companies, conducting normal business, and incurring normal travel expenses. American Express predicts that the average cost for a domestic business trip in the United States will increase by 2.8% to $1,139. Their prediction for international travel is that it will increase by 4.3% to $3,556. Depending on the size of the company and the frequency of travel, those expenses add up quickly.

If we assume a small to medium company with 5 sales people who travel to meet with prospective customers and sell new business, and an additional 25 who travel to deliver the products and services sold by the sales people, there are 30 people hopping around the country or globe. If they average 20 trips each per year, and 10% (or 2 trips per year) are international trips, then based on the travel expenses predicted by American Express the company will spend almost $830,000 on travel in 2009.

In addition to the tangible costs, travel introduces other complexities that can be avoided. Airlines oversell their flights and cancel frequently due to weather, risking leaving business travelers stranded and unable to make important meetings. Hotels are often overbooked. Employees are forced to be away from their homes and families. The list goes on.

Unified Communications can solve those problems. Perhaps that is why unified communications is one of the few technologies that seems to be growing in this abysmal economy. Companies are examining whether travel is really necessary when video conferencing, desktop sharing, and other virtual meeting technologies exist.

The savings will be substantially more than the investment in deploying unified communications, and the unified communications investment will continue to return dividends years after the initial investment. The actual delivery of products and services may still require sending personnel to customer sites to implement, but our hypothetical business can cut their travel by as much as 75% per year by leveraging unified communications and virtual meetings.  Over the course of three years, that would represent a return on investment for unified communications of more than $1.5 million.

Again- your mileage may vary. This is just a pretend company I made up for my example. What if your company has 50 sales people and 150 service delivery personnel? What it your company is HP, or IBM, or BT- with thousands of employees traveling all over the world to sell and deliver services? Take a look at what your company spends each year on travel, and then examine how much of that travel is really necessary and how much could be replaced by unified communications. Odds are good that the cost savings will be significant and that the business case for unified communications will justify itself.

Cutting Edge Microsoft UC

Microsoft has put a fair amount of marketing muscle into their Unified Communications offering. Many organizations are busy architecting, deploying, and implementing the various components- Exchange Server 2007, Office Communications Server 2007, the OCS 2007 Mediation Server, etc. The standard, supported configuration involves separate server hardware for most of the components, and an on-site PBX solution. Evangelyze Communications however, working with VoIP provider NGT (New Global Telecom) has built a fully functional Microsoft Unified Communications deployment running almost entirely virtualized in Hyper-V, and connected remotely to a hosted VoIP service. You can learn more from Mike Stacy’s blog: Hosted Gateway/SIP Trunk with OCS. The result is a Microsoft Unified Communications deployment with significant cost savings in terms of hardware and infrastructure.

Outsourcing Unified Communications

Taking the plunge and moving from traditional communications into the world of unified communications is not without its learning curve and price tag. It doesn’t have to break the bank per se. You can analyze the needs of the company and the existing communications infrastructure and come up with a strategy that leverages the investment you have already made to deliver the benefits you are looking for. But, you would still need to implement, maintain, and support that deployment. More and more, unified communications offerings are popping up as an outsourced, or hosted solution. Take a look at Hosted options for unified communications ‘evolving’ on SearchUnifiedCommunications to find out more about this trend.