Protocol, can transform stand-alone communications applications into components of a service-oriented architecture.
By taking advantage of these Web Services interfaces, companies can integrate specific business processes with their communications systems. For example, a business event such as a manufacturing alarm, inventory shortage or medical emergency can trigger notification of key personnel, automatic creation of meet-me conferences or establishment of a Web conference.
In one scenario, a shortage in a warehouse could trigger an IM to all product inventory managers, along with a proposed confer-ence-call meeting time, and additional information about the trends leading to the shortage, enabling the organization to quickly address the underlying causes and reestablish the proper pipelines. In this example, an organization can reduce the losses associated with an outage by $6,250 to $25,000 through faster communication to quickly react to a supply-chain disruption.
Most companies see the benefits in integrating unified communications with business processes. About 46% of enterprises surveyed are planning to integrate business processes with communications applications, while another 20% are evaluating communications-enabled business processes.
Any IT investment must accomplish one of two things: reduce costs or increase revenue. Positive ROI is achieved when either of those values exceeds upfront and ongoing investment costs. Assuming that companies on average can expect to spend roughly $560 per person on their unified communications implementations, in an organization size of 10,000 employees, this translates into a need to demonstrate some combination of $5.6 million in cost savings or increased revenues, typically within a payback period of one year or less.
Sounds like a tall order. But what if you can demonstrate that elimination of phone tag as a result of presence-enabled communications reduces the time workers spend chasing down each other and retrieving voice mail messages by 30 minutes per employee per day?
If you figure that employees make an average of $30 an hour (that includes salary and benefits), this translates into potential cost savings of $15 per day, per employee. That comes to 123 hours per employee, per year (based on 245 workdays in a year), for total savings of $36.75 million, based on our 10,000-employee scenario. Of course, this assumes that the time saved is used for other productive purposes.
So if we assume that a 10,000-person organization implements unified communications at a cost of $5.6 million, a savings of 30 minutes per day per person easily justifies the investment. Even if we assume only half of the saved time is reused for productive business activity, we still see a positive return of $15.5 million.
Real-time communications architecture A real time communications dashboard (RTCD) is a key component of a unified communications architecture
(imaging, distance, learning, location tracking, physical security)
INDUSTRY-SPECIFIC
Web conferencing
Audio conferencing
Real-time communication dashboard
Unified messaging
Instant messaging
Desktop video
Presence
IP-enabling contact centers
Wireless voice over IP/mobility
Room-to-room video over IP
Network optimization, management, security
SOURCE: NEMERTES RESEARCH
Unified communications applications are deployed at most companies But the integration is lacking
80
70
60
50
Web conferencing
Videoconferencing (room-to-room)
IP audio conferencing
Instant messaging
IP videoconferencing (desktop)
Real-time communications dashboards
40
30
20
10
0
SOURCE: NEMERTES RESEARCH
References:
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