Unified communications (UC) have been around for 4 or 5 years. It is a concept that has been pushed hard by the hardware vendors into the enterprise sector but has meant little to medium sized business. I think this is for two reasons. Firstly the integrated hardware solutions which the vendors have been promoting have been prohibitively expensive for smaller businesses and secondly they have failed to explain any of the real benefits to be gained from UC.

Unified Communications covers 3 key areas:

Collaboration
Email, Instant Messaging (IM), document and media management, enterprise search

Real time applications
Voice, video, web meetings and recordings

Messaging
Voicemail, fax to email, voice to text, text to voice

But what does adopting these features and functionality mean to your business? By improving your workers communication and collaboration you can make significant increases in productivity. Studies show that on average users of UC can save 30 minutes per day, which is significant whatever the workers role. Over the coming weeks I’ll take a closer look at the increasing pressures of delivering these services to the end user and the steps that can be taken to allow a strategic approach to communications to prevail. For further information please see latest whitepaper “Turning IT into a Strategic Business Driver”