Unlocking the Keys to UC Success.By Irwin Lazar, Vice President and Service Director, Nemertes Research

Unified communications (UC) isn’t just for large companies. SMBs can also benefit from UC’s ability to improve collaboration, support new ways of work and improve extranet communications. Applications such as instant messaging (IM), Web conferencing and video conferencing can improve collaboration among distributed workers by providing richer communica-tions, as well as the ability to share and collaborate on documents in real time. Adding presence awareness to email or IM applications enables individuals to easily locate the right co-worker for a task and quickly establish a communication session to meet a particular challenge. Extending messaging, telephony and collaboration applications to mobile devices increases productivity of those away from the office and can improve specific business processes such as field sales and support.

UC deployments in the SMB are increasing, with 43 percent of SMBs already implementing some form of integrated communications applications. But UC deployments vary. Some companies are simply deploying IP phones plus unified messaging. Others go further, defining UC as integration of desktop and cellphones, or introducing presence-enabled communications that provide desktop buddy lists showing presence status, allowing click-to-call functionality or meet-me conferencing as well as IM. Some solutions even extend this functionality into email inboxes or office applications.

How companies define UC is often a function of their awareness of UC feature availability. SMBs, often lacking dedicated IT staff, largely rely on their resellers to tell them about new functionality. Those that wish to take advantage of new features are often scared away by the potential cost and complexity of integrating various real-time communications applications (such as voice, video, IM and conferencing) with older tools (such as email and voice messaging) from both IT administrator and end-user perspectives.

A successful implementation of UC in an SMB re-quires meeting the twin challenges of providing a simple end-user experience while making administration as easy as possible to support staffing constraints. This

is crucial because, on average, SMBs have one to two people managing their voice systems, compared to more than 10 for larger organizations.

On the end-user side, achieving a successful UC implementation requires integrating UC into the applications workers use on a daily basis to minimize training and support requirements. For instance, adding presence status to an email inbox can allow an individual to look at a message, see if the sender is online, and start an IM session or initiate a phone call. The power of IM buddy lists is expanded by adding the ability to initiate phone calls, begin a desktop video chat, or instantly start a Web conference to share and collaborate on documents.

SMBs cite customer satisfaction and feature adoption as the two most critical success factors for UC and IP telephony projects. While cost is important, overwhelmingly IT managers say that applications must be easy to use and reliable. Since SMBs typically lack a large number of IT staff, reliability is a critical metric for success. But reliability isn’t just about downtime: Reliability covers such factors as call completion, call drops, poor call quality or intermittent failures of any UC application.

To ensure success, SMBs should look at approaches that minimize administration challenges while maximizing ease of use. Bundled solutions that integrate UC applications including voice, IM, audio, video, Web conferencing and presence features with other collaboration applications such as email and file sharing can minimize total cost of ownership, while adding important communications capabilities.

Irwin Lazar is vice president and service director at Nemertes Research.

For more information, please visit www.nemertes.com.

©Nemertes Research 2011

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