As companies expand their global reach, increase their number of virtual workers, and look for ways to cut costs while driving revenues, they are turning to unified communications applications (UC) that let users “click to communicate and collaborate.” Giving users a single point of entry to a variety of communications applications—including voice,conferencing, presence, messaging and collaboration—is no longer a choice. For businesses that want to stay competitive in this increasingly global and dispersed marketplace, unified communications delivered with an “in the office” experience anywhere is a necessity.
In Frost & Sullivan’s ongoing research into the unified communications market, we find three key drivers spurring the adoption of UC:
• An increasingly virtual workplace;
• The ongoing pressure to do more with less;
• The need for an open, interoperable communications architecture.
This issue paper will drill down into the reasons behind the three main drivers, highlight the implications for end users, and deliver a call to action for IT managers who are ready to embrace unified communications technology to give their organizations a competitive advantage.
The Growth of the Virtual Workplace
The very nature of the workplace is changing, as more and more people are working in locations that are different from those of their colleagues, managers and direct reports. It’s no longer the case that road warriors—salespeople, service personnel and executive management—are the only people who routinely work outside the office. These days, everyone from contact-center agents to HR managers to general knowledge workers are likely to spend at least some of their time working from a remote or home-based location, and as the lines between home life and work life continue to blur, many employees find themselves “on the job” even as they watch their kids’ soccer games or commute on the train to work. There’s no doubt that the virtual workplace offers significant advantages to companies and their employees. These include reduced facilities costs for businesses (including leasing, utilities, security, and so on) the ability to hire and retain the most effective people, regardless of where they live in relation to the organization; the opportunity to expand into new markets without incurring a significant initial (and untested) capital investment; and the likelihood that virtual employees will be more productive, loyal and enthusiastic than their officebound colleagues.
Myriad third-party research supports the benefits. For instance, in a 2009 study, the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) reported that 84 percent of companies believe that flexible work arrangements in their organization boost employee morale. That’s up from 76 percent over 2008. And 78 per cent of polled companies say flexwork options bolster retention rates up from 64 percent the previous year.
DOING MORE WITH LESS IS THE NEW NORMAL
Companies of all sizes and in all industries have been struggling with a new economic reality for several years: budgets are extremely tight, and no expense can be justified unless it is going to deliver cost savings, productivity improvements, or an increase in business performance (or, ideally, all three). Even as the economy recovers, companies are embracing austerity as the new normal and looking for innovative ways to fuel growth. This is true for all lines of business and departments, including sales and marketing, IT and telecom, human resources, research and development and service and support.
Generally, this mandate to do less with more cuts across two lines:
• There are continued pressures to increase staff efficiency through process improvements; reducing unproductive time such as travel and commuting; leveraging collaboration tools to increase teamwork and productivity; and increasing staff availability and their access to services and information from anywhere.
• There is an increased need to streamline IT infrastructure and reduce associated expenses while enhancing business performance, improving total cost of ownership and return on investment—a very tough mandate. Companies are looking at open,standards-based architectures, unified communications applications, centralized data weighing the value of capex versus opex expenditures and hosted versus premises based solutions. They also want and need to let employees take their own mobile devices to work, with flexible plans that clearly separate personal and business use.
Staff Efficiencies
Companies are increasingly looking for ways to increase employee efficiency. It’s not enough to simply save a few minutes here and a few minutes there in a given employee’s day ; rather, companies must find ways to dramatically improve productivity by freeing up large blocks of usable time (say, the hours spent on a repetitive task, or the days spent traveling to and from meetings).
At the same time, organisations want to make that time more effective to fuel an increase in business performance. That involves giving employees access to people,applications and information regardless of where they are or what hardwaredevices they’re using. Presence information, conferencing and collaboration applications, Voice over IP and mobile interfaces ensure that employees can work as though they are in the office, even when they’re doing business from home or on the road.
Even as the economic outlook shows signs of improving, companies continue to look for ways to reduce their communications’ capital and operating expenses. One way to do that is to move to an all-software model that leverages IP networks for lower implementation, management and operational costs. Savings can come from a number of areas, including reduced PSTN, international calling, and cellular charges; lower third-party conferencing bridge or services costs; lower hardware and related cooling and electricity costs; and decreased travel expenses.
As they consider the best way to deploy and leverage their communications investments,many organizations are also looking closely at virtualization. By letting companies build efficient, internal clouds that give IT managers control and choice while lowering capital and operating costs, virtualization maximizes hardware usage, simplifies application management, enhances application performance, and supports business continuity. Furthermore, desktop virtualization presents a remote desktop to the user from a remote server, which he or she can access from anywhere and on any compatible device. This makes it easy for employees to work from anywhere, while maintaining data integrity and general information security.
The implication:
Companies are looking for communications technologies that not only improve productivity, collaboration and mobile access, but which also streamline their infrastructure and reduce operational and capital expense.
The call to action:
Companies must recognize that they are under new rules when it comes to cost efficiencies and productivity. Every IT deployment should do two things: Save the organization money by reducing implementation and/or operational costs, and improve productivity—and even drive revenues—by giving employees more time and more ways to do their jobs effectively.
ADVANCED COMMUNICATIONS DEMAND OPEN ARCHITECTURES
As they deploy unified communications and collaboration applications, companies must be free to choose best-in-class technologies that map to their business objectives and support open, flexible architectures. To be fully effective—and deliver the biggest bang for the buck—UC solutions must integrate a variety of applications and services, and connect employees inside and outside the corporate firewall, on any endpoint device and across any network.
This is especially true for employees who need to interact with people outside the organisation, including partners, suppliers and customers. But it also holds for internal users whose companies deploy a variety of endpoint systems across an array of networks. Most companies today are multi-vendor operations, with business around the world, and a large number of remote, mobile or home-based workers.
The need for openness becomes even more important as companies look to inject communications into their business processes to reduce latency, speed decision-making, and improve the company’s bottom line. So-called Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) demands open architectures and APIs to enable integration with back-office, CRM and productivity applications.
The era of the “walled garden” in communications—in which vendors released only proprietary hardware and software that resisted integration and interoperability—is coming to a close. As IT becomes intrinsically linked with business success, CIOs cannot allow themselves to be locked into a single vendor or closed architecture for critical communications functionality.
CONCLUSION
Unified communications and virtualization can deliver significant advantages to end users, IT managers and their employers alike. Several factors are coming together to make these new forms of technology not a luxury, but a necessity for business success in the 21st century. Employees are increasingly virtual, working from disparate locations around the world, and they need access to enterprise communications applications—and each other—from anywhere and on any device. Companies are living with tighter budgets and strict mandates to cut costs and improve productivity and business performance, a new way of doing business that is unlikely to change even as the economy improves. And IT managers are realising that they must deploy open, standards-based communications applications to support integration and interoperability, and support a variety of end users and devices.
A Frost & Sullivan White Paper
by Melanie Turek, Industry Director
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