Unified Communications Streamlines Operations

Unified communications can help address the challenge today's organizations face as they contend with ‎increasingly complex environments that feature a wide array of communications methods.‎

Employees, business partners, and customers now conduct business using seemingly infinite combinations of ‎phones, voice messaging, e-mail, fax, mobile clients, and rich-media conferencing. Without unified ‎communications, however, these tools are often not used as effectively as they could be. The result is ‎information overload and misdirected communications that delay decisions, slow down processes, and reduce ‎productivity.‎

Unified Communications Evolves
As precursors to unified communications, IP telephony and IP communications solutions have proven their ‎ability to help solve such problems, enabling organizations to streamline business processes and reduce costs. ‎For years, companies have realized the benefits that carrying voice, data, and video communications across a ‎common, IP infrastructure can bring. ‎

From these, unified communications solutions have evolved and offer even greater benefits. Unified ‎communications applications are actually integrated within an IP network to provide structure and intelligence ‎that can help organizations integrate their communications more closely with business processes, and ensure ‎information reaches recipients quickly, through the most appropriate medium. ‎

Unified communications allows businesses to collaborate in real time using advanced applications from an ‎integrated, easy-to-use interface. These applications include:‎

• Video conferencing ‎
  
• Integrated voice and Web conferencing ‎
  
• Mobile IP soft phones ‎
  
• Voicemail, and more ‎

Unified Communications Benefits
Unified communications solutions can save time and help control costs, while improving productivity and ‎competitiveness:‎

• In a 2005 Sage Research study, 86% of companies using unified communications reported that productivity benefits have ‎grown. ‎
  
• More than 60% reported savings of three or more hours per week for each mobile worker. ‎

Such studies confirm that migrating to a unified communications system provides a substantial return on ‎investment (ROI) and a reduced total cost of ownership.‎