Many people use unified communications (UC) without making the connection that UC and a rich communication suite could replace some of their existing, more expensive traditional communications services.
If you ask most business professionals about Skype (News - Alert), they’ve probably used it or at least heard about it. The familiarity with UC, however, is typically far lower.
Because many of the consumer and business UC service offerings are seen as their own thing and not as part of a larger trend to move away from traditional phone, email and videoconference services, there’s a surprising gap between the possibilities available today and the actual implementations.
Most businesses just don’t make the connection that they can replace their costly conferencing options with lower-cost UC solutions, even if they are already using part of a UC suite such as Microsoft (News - Alert) Lync.
With something like Lync, conferencing integrated with UC is staring the business in the face. It just is a question of connecting the dots and showing employees and management that UC now can take care of all communication needs of a business.
An approach that has been successful for some has been a gradual rollout where the newer UC conferencing is available side by side with the existing conferencing platform.
This was the tact taken recently by Cargill, the large food, agriculture, financial and industrial products and services supplier.
Cargill implemented a UC solution that enabled UC conferencing that coexisted with existing conferencing infrastructure without duplicating trunking facilities. It then let employees gradually discover the benefits of UC-based conferencing.
As anyone familiar with UC might predict, employees quickly figured out that the new UC solution was the better option.
“We had sites come to us and say they wanted to try Lync as their PBX (News - Alert)…we actually told them no three times,” noted Steve Hanson, who was part of the transition, in a recent blog post.
Cargill relented, and UC conferencing has spread like wildfire within the company.
So the first step is using the part of UC that deliver new functionality, then slowly phase in the functionality within UC that replicates existing infrastructure. With a little time, the benefits of the UC solution will make themselves known.
Edited by Alisen Downey