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Mike Fratto, editor of Network Computing, recently posted some good thoughts on how he sees making the case for unified communications.

Of course building a solid business case, for UC or for anything else, is the first important step. As Fratto correctly notes, executives “want to know exactly how UC will make the business more profitable and efficient.”

Rightfully so, too -- if some young hotshot came to me as CEO with talk about “unified communications” and asking for budget, that’s the first thing I’d want to know. And as Fratto also notes, there haven’t always been good, as in number-crunchable, answers to that.

“Migrating to UC is often orders of magnitude more costly than simply renewing an existing

PBX (News - Alert) license,” as he says, since you’ve got such costs as software licenses, servers to run the system, new handsets and headsets, gateways to the PSTN and all kinds of other stuff, not to mention training. And people still try to get budget by emphasizing soft benefits, frequently not much more substantial than “It’s cool, it’ll be better and everyone else is doing it.” And they’re surprised when the boss says no.

But if you really believe UC is critical for your business, then as Fratto advises, “make a multilayered business case.Go deep and get your financials in a row based on the totality of the system, not the individual parts.”

This means, he says, emphasizing such advantages as letting employees unify their voice, email, and IM message in-box, or manage their presence and contact preferences, “and using follow-me features so they can be reached regardless of where they are, simply and easily.”

That will look a lot more impressive. Hey, find out where the pain is and solve it -- Fratto gives an example of listening to a manager complaining about cellphones ringing during meetings. Fratto mentioned that Microsoft’s (News - Alert) OCS, when paired with a Windows phone, can disable ringing and alerts based on calendar events. As he says, the manager “perked up, leaned over the table and said ‘That! I want that’!”

Emphasize the presence available in enterprise UC as a core feature, knowing where everybody is and being able to contact them. Managers love that. As Fratto himself has experienced, “being able to reach someone on IM, add more people when needed, move the conversation to voice, share my desktop, and schedule and manage meetings on the fly has saved boatloads of time,” and made him more productive.

Managers really love that.