- A Combination for Exponential Savings
- A Webtorials State-of-the-Market Report
- Steven Taylor and Leslie Barteaux
In examining two related IT capabilities, Unified Communications and cloud-based services, we see that each individually brings tremendous power to companies of all sizes. However, many of the strongest advantages of implementing UC have eluded SMBs because of the cost of having an IT staff to support this effort.
Bringing the two together - implementing Unified Communications as a cloud-based service - provides a perfect confluence.
As noted above, the annual recovered time-value for a theoretical company with 50 Knowledge Workers could be $942,500. Providers of these services will be able to demonstrate a rapid RoI both by minimizing capital costs and by optimizing the efforts of hard-to-find IT Support Staff allowing them to concentrate on business-specific needs. The bottom line is that support of UC for the SMB moves from being a major IT undertaking to being a commodity product.
The time for UC-as-a-Service is now.
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Companion report: 2011 SMB Communications Plans and Priorities
- ROI Trumps Technology
- A Webtorials State-of-the-Market Report
Next Step: Now that we've shown that implementing UC as a cloud-based service is an obvious choice, request your copy of the 2011 Sourcebook of Hosted and Cloud-Based VoIP and UC Services now.
Please note that this report was made possible in part due to the generous support of Fonality.
As we compiled information for this report, one of the tasks that we focused on was quantifying some statements that are typically offered but only in a qualitative fashion.
The first instance surrounds the implementation of Unified Communications. IT seems to be common knowledge that UC can save time, hence money. But exactly how much time is spent on tasks for which UC can help, especially in the critical SMB environment? And what is the dollar-value of this recovered time.
The second instance surrounds the number of IT support staff necessary to support a given number of Knowledge Workers. Again, we know that a major advantage of using cloud-based services is an economy of scale, but exactly how does that economy of scale play out from a quantitative perspective?
The result is that regardless of the size of the business, the combination of VoIP and UC in the cloud can bring exponential value beyond their value separately. However, this is particularly critical for the SMBs, a market segment that faces unique challenges and that is often ignored in major research studies.