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Unified coms projects should focus on increasing agility

Unified coms projects should focus on increasing agility

Companies should implement a unified communications (UC) strategy in order to increase business agility rather than because they want to cut costs, it has been advised.

According to business technology analyst Gartner, early adopters of US solutions consider improvements to employee collaboration, productivity and customer services to be more important benefits than any cost reduction they may have enjoyed.

Despite these findings, the survey of 300 organisations revealed that lower total cost of ownership and lower equipment costs are the top two expectations of UC among companies yet to implement the technology.

"It is evident that there is a significant difference between the expectations of UC and its actual benefits. We recommend that organisations build a business case based on enabling mobility and agility rather than on reducing IT department costs," said Steve Blood, research vice president at Gartner.

"The value for organisations is to reduce human latency within a process that improves business’s ability to respond and to be agile."

According to research company IntelliCom Analytics, UC applications accounted for just 6.4 per cent of total business communications software revenues in 2007, suggesting that many companies have not yet implemented a long-term UC strategy.