By Josie Sephton
In a nutshell:
The proliferation of communications channels has set expectations around cost and productivity
benefits. Unified Communications (UC) is proffered as a way of helping bring them all together,
but as the benefits of UC are more widely acknowledged, just ‘how much’ UC should businesses
be thinking about?
Key points:
• As a result of a piecemeal approach to adoption of new communications mechanisms,
many businesses today find themselves operating in a highly fragmented
communications landscape where they are unable to fully reap the range of cost and
productivity benefits that such tools ultimately promise
• Unified Communications (UC) solutions such as Unified Directory (UD), Unified
Messaging (UM) and rules-based routing are increasingly accepted as a set of tools that
bring this fragmented environment together in a coherent and structured way.
• Implementation of UC potentially allows an organisation to take more advantage of
emerging mechanisms. As businesses start to evaluate and move forward with UC, a
key question they face is the extent to which they implement UC.
• To realise its full benefits, a broader set of UC components will have a greater impact on
the business, and, as far as possible, it is much better to aim for a richer set of
capabilities from the outset.
Content Contributors: Josie Sephton