Unified communications will help organisations transform their businesses – if they can work out how to make them truly unified, says James Steventon
There are now more ways than ever of communicating. Traditional and mobile telephones, IP telephony, email, instant messaging and SMS mean that we need never
be out of touch. And shared applications allow us to work with colleagues even when separated by huge distances. But these technologies are dependent on a number of separate infrastructures and solutions. Merging these into a unified communications infrastructure has the potential to make them even more effective and versatile while reducing costs and support overheads.
DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES
However, it’s not quite that simple. That’s because there hasn’t been a truly consistent and integrated approach to providing unified communications solutions. Not surprisingly, each vendor is coming at it from a different perspective. Software vendors tend to focus on shared applications, such as Microsoft’s Sharepoint technology, while networking companies may concentrate on fixed/mobile convergence or some other infrastructure aspect.
At the same time, some CIOs are being kept awake at night worrying about how they’re going to integrate all those complex legacy communications systems.
The fact is, you won’t truly reap the benefits of unified communications unless you consider all angles and all parts of the solution, from cabling right through to applications.
This confusion in the market and lack of a clear message about what constitutes unified communications is why there is currently so little take-up in spite of all the talk about it. How many people do you actually know who use an IP phone in the office that switches automatically to the GSM network when they step out of the building? Not many, I’m sure. Similarly, the number of people actually collaborating via Sharepoint-enabled applications is small – if a company is doing this at all it’s typically one department or group of people.
So most of the ‘unified communications’ projects that have been implemented to date have been point solutions. What’s lacking is the end-to-end implementation, which is where companies will really start to feel the benefits.
FLEXIBLE WORKING
It’s not that companies lack the initiative or the willingness. Perhaps the most significant potential of unified communications is its effect on working practices – particularly mobile and home workers. According to Gartner, the number of home workers has increased 800 per cent in the past five years. Both employees and employers are embracing new, flexible ways of working, seeing benefits for productivity, business agility and work/life balance. But instead of collaborating with colleagues using shared applications, most people are still emailing files to one another. And they’re still using ordinary landlines and cellphones instead of enjoying the cost benefits of on-net calls using soft phones.
Nor are companies being held back from adopting unified communications by the technology. It’s available, it’s mature and there’s a good chance you have already implemented key parts of it and have proven the ROI case.
Many UK companies have already rolled out IP telephony in some form, and converged networks – though they are a bigger undertaking – are high on the agenda for most firms of any size. The ROI case for IP telephony and network convergence has already been demonstrated. And once those projects are complete, you have the important physical infrastructure – the network – for unified communications.
Now it’s time to squeeze some real value out of that investment, to sweat those assets by adding in the applications.
MAKING IT HAPPEN
James Steventon, Connectivity Solutions Unit director for Computacenter Services, was formerly managing director of Allnet, which was acquired by Computacenter earlier this year.
I believe that Computacenter has a strong role to play in this - an opportunity to provide some clarity around the issue while providing the services to make it happen. Essentially, it is all about gluing together the pieces.
Our Connectivity Solutions Unit (CSU) has a unique combination of qualities that allows us to do this. These include skills and capabilities that start with the physical infrastructure, such as cabled and wireless infrastructure, through the routing and switching elements and the core processing, core management and device management aspects. It encompasses the applications and even areas touching on employment strategy, human resources and business processes. We can also go beyond the desktop to include the datacentre, hosting and storage management.
We don’t approach this from one fixed viewpoint. We maintain close relationships with all the vendors involved, understand what their capabilities are and their roadmaps – so we can help ensure the future value of the solution
and reduce through-life costs. In the end, we have an independent perspective that produces a solution based on best of breed components and individual customer business requirements.
While people have been doing more talking about unified communications than implementing it, the kind of end-to-end approach offered by Computacenter will, I believe, start to become a reality next year – once companies have the basic infrastructure in place. By 2009 it will be here to stay.
