To the surprise of no one in the tech industry, the FCC (News - Alert) noted in a recent report, "Local Telephone Competition: Status as of June 2013," that, in both the individual consumer and business markets, VoIP adoption is on the rise.
The analysis was expanded upon in a Marlin Business Services Corp. blog post that discussed the savings businesses can expect by switching from services such as personal branch exchanges to VoIP. Indeed, it states that this is one of the largest problems with current VoIP adoption: businesses want to save money, but they are having a hard time trying to quantify their possible savings.
Marlin indicated recently that businesses expect to cut down on their travel budgets, teleconferencing costs, and email expenses by using VoIP services in place of, or in addition to, those common business elements. More than half of businesses profiled were unable to figure out if they had actually saved money in such endeavors.
Further, a Dimensional Research study regarding Microsoft (News - Alert) Lync found 80 percent of businesses wanted to use Lync to save on travel, 76 percent want to save on Web and teleconferencing, 66 percent want to save on meeting room space costs, 55 percent want to save on traditional telephony costs such as desk phones, and 36 percent want to save on email expenses.
Savings can be more easily calculable if businesses break down savings analysis into distinct steps. First, businesses must accurately measure usage of, for instance, teleconferencing platforms. Once businesses break down how much they use teleconferencing technologies each week, month, and year, they can begin to estimate costs saved with VoIP services.
Businesses can also report how much they would have spent on non-UC services and then compare those directly with comparable VoIP services. Third-party providers should be able to provide businesses with information related to how much telecom calls will run them each minute. From that basic unit, businesses can scale up to months and years, and they can take those VoIP rate-based totals and compare them to what they had spent on similar features in the past.
This can be difficult to measure because costs are often lumped together by department spending over long stretches of time. A single department's phone usage across an entire quarter is not fine-grained enough to match up with a per-minute basis a VoIP provider may be able to issue. It will take in-depth analysis of individual usage within departments over shorter periods of time to have those figures match up, but once that in-depth task is accomplished, IT departments should be able to figure out overall business savings when switching to UC for their communications needs.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson