Capturing the benefits of UC
- The term UC is ill defined, one person’s UC is another person’s collaboration and when it is difficult to define a term or technology it is often diffucult to agree a baseline from which to chart business benefits.
- Organisations like to see firm of evidence of proposed cost savings before investing in a project, UC at this moment in time does not have too many accepted case studies – although this could be changing (see below).
The first task of any organisation that is looking to evaluate and deploy UC is to define exactly what UC means for your organisation. Does it include infrastructure such as LAN/WAN and scale all the way through to collaboration/social networking or does UC focus on the the core components of instant messaging, voice and video? The answer for each organisation may well be different but without defining UC confusion will reign for all involved and confusion equals: less cost savings, longer deployment times and a less engaged user base. Once you have defined UC for your business be sure to baseline your existing estate. Understand how much is being spent, on what and by whom. Once you have the baseline, test potential cost savings. Use any pilot that you are running to baseline the figures.
Below is a table of potential hard savings from the implementation of UC.
| Tangible | Expected | Stretch | Notes |
| Fixed Calls | 33% | 50% | Reducing the number of calls made by a company to the PSTN and moving them to the internet or a private MPLS network can drive upto 50% reduction in PSTN charges |
| Mobile Calls | 33% | 33% | mobile/celluar use continues to grow in the enterprise and proves an expensive cost per minute. UC can help prevent the growth of mobile usage through the use of presence and reduce the overall cost by moving minutes away from the mobile carriers to a local or on net call. Projected savings of potentially 33% |
| Audio Conf. Calls | 50% | 80% | A large growth area of voice traffic and another fat piece of margin for UC to go after. The UC industry and analysts believe there are significant savings to be had in Audio Conferencing, potentially up to 80% by moving calls away from audio conferencing providers to a self provided system |
| Port Management | 50% | 60% | Large enterprise often pay managed service fees based on a per voice port charge – this is especially common in Europe. UC via PC enabled soft phones provides supplementing a mobile/cellular phone could well remove the need for fixed physical phones. Analysts suggest that as many as 50% of information workers will not have a land line by 2013 |
There are beginning to be some examples of UC costs savings being released into the public domain. Take a look at what Aspect Software and Siemens Enterprise Communications are reporting, I anticipate there will be plenty more examples coming along over the next 6 – 12 months, including (hopefully!) from my own project.