Cloud communications can offer significant savings for businesses over premise based equipment. It offers predictability, cost-control and flexibility, along with lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and eliminating capital expenditure costs. Martin Northend outlines the key factors in building the business case for cloud communications.

According to Nemertes Research, the business case for cloud communications is particularly apparent for smaller enterprises. Robin Gareiss, senior founding partner at Nemertes Research told the Enterprise Connect (News - Alert) conference earlier this year, that smaller companies with little internal VoIP experience would benefit most. She calculated that a smaller company with around 80 users could reduce its unified communications TCO by nearly 20 percent over five years by using a cloud based solution.

But it isn’t only in small enterprises where cloud communications can offer significant savings. We have identified four different scenarios where the cloud can play an important communications role for any type of businesses. They are described in the questions below.

• Do you want to deploy an advanced communications system but don’t have the time or resources to engage in a complex and time-consuming purchasing cycle?
• Do you need to deliver unified communications to employees, but lack the available budget for a capital purchase?
• Do you have clear plans for growth that includes additional locations, employees and home workers but are concerned about the cost and technology headaches of making change happen?
• Do you anticipate workforce change and worry that your existing communications systems don’t have the flexibility and scalability to react to new requirements?

If one or more of these scenarios sounds familiar to you, then you could make a strong business case for cloud communications. It offers predictability, cost-control and flexibility and allows you to better align costs with revenue and actual user requirements. In addition cloud communications minimizes the need for capital investment and eliminates the subsequent costs of ownership.

And this latter point is crucial in developing the business case as many of the costs of ownership are hidden. They are difficult to measure or frequently not directly attributed to the system.

Uncovering hidden costs

Uncovering and applying values to these costs enables a clear and accurate comparison between your existing premises-based system and your planned cloud communications service. The most common hidden costs include:

• System acquisition costs, including resources during evaluation to financing charges
• Annual maintenance and software assurance
• Installation and project management
• Monitoring and managing the system
• Upgrade costs during the life of the system
• Physically housing the system, including power, heating, ventilation and air conditioning
• Time and effort associated with managing multiple sites
• IT staff and training costs
• Security, disaster recovery and backup insurance

But perhaps the biggest cost is that of making the wrong decision, and becoming locked into the wrong technology. And it’s a cost (and risk) eliminated by the pay-as-you-go flexibility of cloud communications.

Taking the risk out of unified communications

We recommend you move to the cloud in stages – based on what’s right for your organization. But that doesn’t mean that you have to wait for functionality or flexibility. You can, for example, add user capacity, accommodate new mobile and home workers, and get new locations online fast – only paying for what you use.

Cloud communications can work in tandem with your existing hardware-based system, you’re simply adding functionality on top until you feel ready to take the next step.

We have designed an online calculator, which has been independently certified by Mainstay Partners, to see how much money you can save by moving to the cloud. Just click here and first enter the number of users you wish to support.

Martin Northend is Marketing Director for OpenScape Cloud Services at Siemens (News - Alert) Enterprise Communications. If you want to find out more, we have created a video about building the business case for unified communications. Watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPgOuWmnxeE