NEC Resource Center

How to Benchmark and Rank Unified Communications (UC) Technology

It should come as no surprise to anyone that companies are still struggling to understand how to make the right technology decisions. Too often, businesses make important growth decisions based on a narrow understanding of their IT environment—which can have a negative impact down the line as the environment continues to change.

To avoid error when choosing new technologies, businesses need successful growth strategies that make use of innovative technologies. In order to determine what your business’s growth strategy should encompass, you need a thorough understanding of your market. By assessing the technical innovations within your market, your industry’s key challenges, your customers, and the best practices that have led to your own past successes, your business can preemptively ward off future regret by making the right technology choice the first time.

Key Industry Challenges

The businesses that are most equipped to meet the challenges of modern communications are already employing UC technology and infrastructure. They specifically leverage these new technologies to enhance the quality of communications for employees and customers, while also utilizing innovative UC technology and infrastructure as a means to optimize network traffic as network demand changes.

The following are two of the most common enterprise communications challenges that are addressed by UC technological innovation, and the most popular traits that innovative UC leaders have to answer those stresses:

• IT Infrastructure Stress—the transformation to modern unified communications platforms has seen enterprise communications become more reliant on IT infrastructure—particularly application and media servers, data center and campus IP networks, wide area networks, media gateways and session border controllers.

• Bandwidth Sensitivity—in converged voice, video, and data environments, bandwidth-sensitive IP telephony solutions are now sharing resources with other enterprise applications, with real time applications media traffic granted priority access through configurations set by network administrators. While Server and desktop virtualization has allowed UC to become increasingly dynamic in terms of on-demand capacity, the underlying infrastructure that carries voice and video traffic has largely remained static and unadaptable to utilization spikes.

Trait 1: Innovation-driven leaders are beginning to take a more holistic view of UC infrastructure.

Rather than treating the UC platform, data centers, and enterprise networks as discrete components, innovators are applying emerging standards within their own solutions to deliver a new level of intelligence and self-awareness to UC infrastructure. This ultimately allows UC systems to identify sources of trouble, and then adjust themselves to accommodate spikes in traffic or demand.

Trait 2: Innovative leaders enable UC and enterprise infrastructure solutions to thrive together rather than coexist.

Rather than having a static UC platform running alongside static infrastructure solutions, innovators are building intelligence and feedback loops between UC platforms and the enterprise network that empowers them. This allows the UC solution to preemptively prepare the infrastructure for planned events that will potentially stress it. Also, with the many existing manual configuration processes automated, the enterprise infrastructure is able to become as dynamic as the solutions it serves. 

Key Benchmarking Criteria for Innovative UC Technology

Each year, Frost & Sullivan determines how best-in-class companies worldwide manage growth, innovation, and leadership. Based on the findings of their best practices research, they present an annual Global Technology Innovation Leadership Award in Unified Communications.

If you’re wondering how to differentiate between UC innovators, Frost & Sullivan has created criteria for benchmarking leading unified communications solutions.

1. Uniqueness of Technology
2. Impact on New Products/Applications
3. Impact on Functionality
4. Impact on Customer Value
5. Relevance of Innovation to Industry

Best Practice Award Analysis for NEC

NEC has been an early proponent, adopter, and provider of many new networking technologies. Frost & Sullivan analyzed NEC’s UNIVERGE 3C and UCaaS Solutions for technological innovation. Part of their findings include:

Impact on New Products/Applications

NEC’s UNIVERGE portfolio of solutions are built on key pillars of NEC’s IT Empowered Framework and Smart Enterprise programs, the foundation of which is utilizing adaptable network infrastructures. NEC’s UC products are therefore fully-distributed and data center-ready, virtualized UC solutions. In contrast, traditional network architectures require a near duplication of hardware and costs to achieve similar levels of business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities.

Impact on Customer Value

NEC’s innovation in delivering a high-level of integration between enterprise communication applications and the underlying infrastructure ultimately drives customer value through automation and optimizations. Integration with Software-Defined Networks (SDN) enables real-time communications between the UC platform and the network. NEC’s UNIVERGE 3C platform programmatically adjusts the infrastructure to work around trouble or allocate additional network resources to cope with spikes in demand without administrator interaction.

Global Technology Innovation Leadership Award

According to the 2014 Global Technology Innovation Leadership Award Report, NEC’s holistic approach to deploying enterprise communications solutions, and the level of automation and dynamic flexibility inherent in NEC UC infrastructures should appeal to customers and serve as a roadmap for the direction of communication networks.

But don’t just take our word for it.

Learn more about the criteria used by Frost & Sullivan in awarding the 2014 Global Technology Innovation Leadership Award in Unified Communications Infrastructure

You know your PBX is way past its prime, and economic pressures have lead you to delay its upgrade or replacement.

But there comes a point in time when continuing to sweat your communications  assets no longer makes sense—from both a financial perspective and a business/productivity perspective. Retaining outdated equipment can essentially increase your IT costs and prevent your users from utilizing communications tools that help your business processes.

Phone systems are one of the assets that many companies sweat for too long, and, as a result, many of these organizations are sitting on archaic (or end-of-life) equipment that is no longer efficiently supporting their business while possibly putting it a risk.

Yet for some, the prevailing practice is to continue operating the existing system well past its useful life and beyond the end-of-support.

We often hear the following reasons to avoid upgrading:

• We don’t have the budget, or there is a higher priority budgetary request.
• The lifespan on the last PBX was too short.
• We’re afraid that if we upgrade tomorrow, something better will come out next week (a.k.a. the cycle of obsolescence).
• We’re unclear on our unified communications plans and how our phone system should fit in with UC.
• Newer phone systems are becoming too complex to use.
• The buying cycle is too long, and we will have to get too many people involved who will all have different opinions.
• We don’t know which approach to take—i.e. premises, hybrid, or cloud-based.

There’s a chance that the phones you think are supporting your business aren’t. While the value of your older technology may not have appeared to change—for example, the phones still work, and you can still make calls—the outdated system may be hurting your business.

We know the decision to move to a new telephony system is sometimes a difficult one to make. That’s why we’ve created the following list of 3 of the benefits of a modern unified communications system over an outdated phone system.

1. System Stabilization

If you are a business owner or decision maker, you have probably thought, “We save money keeping the old system. What’s the worst that can happen?”

Every day your business uses an analog, TDM, or older VoIP phone system that has reached end-of-life, you run the risk of having your phone system fail without access to support. If that happens, revenue will likely be lost as a result. How much? Well, you could lose what equates to hours, days, or even weeks of revenue—depending on the amount of time it takes to quickly repair or worst case find and install a new system. 

And hurrying to find a new system isn’t ideal. If your system fails, it could mean you are forced to make a quick replacement decision. Companies that don’t have the time or don’t take the time to research properly before purchase usually discover they’ve spent too much money or are unhappy with their purchase after it is too late to change it. Taking the time to find the right IP Telephony solution or Unified Communications solution will improve your business processes and efficiencies without over-extending your budget.

2. Improved Operational Costs

Maintaining separate systems like directories, conferencing software, voicemail, and telephony is expensive and time consuming for IT departments to sustain. In fact, it can be so time consuming that the IT department spends the majority of their day keeping these systems functional—time that can be better spent on more strategic IT projects.

The older the system, the higher the operational cost is when you don’t upgrade. Some of the costs businesses accrue using older systems include: 

• Proprietary hardware at each location (equipment, phones, PBX)
• Installation
• Licensing
• Maintenance, repairs and upgrades
• Additional services
  • Fax
  • Business SMS
  • HD video meetings
  • Audio conferencing

When you factor the lost IT time spent maintaining each separate communications system  with the opportunity cost of not having the advanced applications and features that modern unified communications provides, you end up with a total cost that is just too high for most businesses to ignore.

3. Competitive Advantage

Have you stopped to think about whether your competitors are taking advantage of modern communications software? If they are and you’re not, then chances are they are able to work smarter, faster, and more efficiently. Working smarter gives them an edge by increasing their productivity and creating a competitive advantage.

Your competitors that are working with updated communications systems, most likely have these advanced features at their disposal:

• Audio/video/web collaboration, white boarding and document sharing
• Support for the mobile workforce with a consistent user experience across smartphones and tablets
• UC clients that provide status, presence, call history
• Integrated vertical applications through standards and open services

While the cost of upgrading may seem high, the advanced applications and features associated with modern communications systems will help re-gain lost competitive edge and offer companies an opportunity to better serve their customers. 

Unified communications can help businesses regain competitive advantage in two ways.

First, a new system can help you increase your revenue by providing your business with the communications applications needed to be more productive and efficient. You could gain better advantages and increased competitive edge by choosing a modern solution with a lower total cost of ownership and features that enable collaboration across your business, improving the speed of your communications.

Secondly, UC provides communications software that makes enterprise-level communications applications available on an ad-hoc basis. This either gives you access to applications that you might not have previously been able to budget for, or, saves your organization money as you no longer have to pay the fees required to utilize multiple services. Replacing hosted web, audio or video conferencing services is a perfect example. The accrued savings can boost the return on your unified communications investment, and expand your competitive edge through re-investment into other IT projects that help your business grow.

Increased Productivity

If you fear that your new technology will become obsolescent and use that as an excuse to avoid upgrading, you shouldn’t.  Look for vendors that offer software assurances and extended warranties for hardware that will provide your business with more security and less risk in the long run.

With a modern communications solution, you ensure that your system has the flexibility to handle rapid growth, giving you the ability to provide support to your increasingly mobile and distributed workforce. Your IT team will re-gain some of their time, allowing them to focus on other strategic IT initiatives. And, your employees will re-coup benefits that improve the speed of communication from access to applications that positively impact your daily business—whether it’s through more efficient collaboration with colleagues, or improving customer response times.  

Options Available to Your Business

Ultimately there is a high cost, in terms of inefficiencies and operational cost, when you continue to operate an outdated or end-of-life phone system.

Some organizations struggle with selecting the best model (premises, hybrid, or cloud-based) to meet long-term communication needs. Check out the infographic below to learn more about the advantages of each option. Ultimately you’ll look for the platform and vendor that has the flexibility to customize the right solution to meet your specific needs. 

Examining the Enterprise Connect Unified Communications RFP Results

Each year at Enterprise Connect, a mock Request for Proposal (RFP) session is held. The mock RFP is a simulation of the requests that enterprises and government agencies put out when looking for a new unified communications solution.

The session, led by independent consultant David Stein, Principal at Stein Consulting Group, assesses telephony products developed by communications vendors.  Each of the vendors that participate are required to answer questions related to their solutions’ architecture, features, and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) over a 3-5 year period.  The goal of the session is three-fold:

• Provide enterprises with an un-biased third party opinion of UC solutions on the market
• To thoroughly assess and discuss the features of each solution
• To monitor and report on burgeoning UC trends

Vendor Review

The UC RFP and Review: Enterprise Communications Platform--Premise vs. Cloud-Based IP Telephony session is the latest in the evolution of the “mock” RFP at Enterprise Connect. This session is a long running tradition and the ideal way to provide potential customers an objective way to learn about the top vendors in the industry.

The RFP was handed out in advance of the conference. Each participating vendor is required to answer questions related to their solutions’ architecture, features, and, new this year, Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) over a 5 year period. This year, seven vendors proposed ten solutions. The proposing vendors come from a variety of backgrounds ranging from over 100 years of telephony experience to very recent entrants into the market.

The RFP specifically includes stringent requirements for high availability, core voice functionality, voicemail, unified messaging, unified communications (e.g. presence, IM, voice, Web, video conferencing), and system administration.

This year’s vendor responses were submitted to Stein, who judged them based on a weighted scale. This year’s scale—same as years past—offered 50 percent of the score to functional/technical requirements, 25 percent to architecture requirements, and the final 25 percent to pricing.

This year also marked the first year that both on-premises and cloud solutions were combined for a sufficiently comprehensive UC solutions showcase. Also, included in this year's session was a panel discussion that covered topics such as integration issues, deployment issues, and how vendors decide which solution—cloud or premises—to propose.

Evident Trends from the Session

The RFP placed emphasis on mobility, virtualization, integration of existing product sets, and improving user interfaces. The continuing trends from last year include:

• Focus on the development of Android and iOS platforms for mobility offerings.
• Significant focus on user experience and development of UC functionality as related there-in.
• Emphasis on virtualization with most components available in virtual configurations.

New or changing trends that became evident from 2013-2014 include:

• Vendor strengths are developing with particular features; i.e. not all vendors provide every feature often desired.
• Gap in UC capabilities amongst respondents is still significant.
• Significant differences still exist in vendor solutions.
• “Average prices” decreased from 2013 to 2014.
• Cloud vs. premises functionality differences more significant than previously thought.
• Cloud vs. premises TCO differences remain significant.

Key Trends for Modern Communications Systems

This year’s session positioned as Premises vs. Cloud was a welcome addition to the conference.  For the first time, conference attendees had access to a more complete representation of the unified communications market.

There are three trends noted in David Stein’s own observations, that communications experts agree are foundational for modern Unified Communications systems. Each system must be/include:

• Software-based—software-based communications solutions have re-defined the way businesses communicate. The most modern, agile, scalable solutions will deliver a fully functional IP-PBX along with a complete set of voice features and UC applications that can be tailored to individual needs. Software-based systems also offer simplified licensing and management features that make it easier for businesses to manage day-to-day communications needs.
• Virtualization—communications systems that can be deployed across distributed architectural platforms offer ultimate flexibility, and improve business continuity and cost saving. Virtualized infrastructures offer benefits such as server consolidation, increased security, operational flexibility and greater application availability during downtime.
• Mobility— Modern communications solutions offer enhanced user-mobility solutions that enable workers to stay connected and productive from any locale. These mobility solutions typically incorporate softphones, mobile applications, call-twinning, call transfer, and fixed mobile convergence options. These tools allow businesses to shorten the time it takes to move projects forward, and ultimately improve the service provided to customers.

NEC did very well, winning the highest total score of all vendors compared in the 2,000 user UC RFP. NEC's UNIVERGE solution won top score both because of its technological strengths, and because it provides customers with a significant economic advantage in terms of TCO.

NEC’s response to the RFP is listed as “on-premises.” However, it’s interesting to note that its software based solution resides on a virtualized server and could easily exist as part of an organization’s private cloud.  Alternatively, this configuration could be hosted off-premises in a commercial data center.

5-year Total Cost of Ownership

Frequently, after organizations have made the decision to replace their existing phone system, a lot of time, energy, and effort go into evaluating and comparing the initial acquisition and installation costs of the vendors that make their short list. This focus on initial costs sometimes means that ongoing operation and maintenance costs are overlooked.  This year Stein added an extensive evaluation to the study that helps determine the “true” cost of a Unified Communications solution.

The addition of the 5-year Total Cost of Ownership section of the RFP gives businesses the opportunity to look beyond the initial costs of implementation, to the costs of operating the solution for five years. This evaluation helps businesses plan a comprehensive budget that takes the long-term operational and maintenance costs into consideration. 

Bottom Line

There are a number of factors to consider in evaluating Unified Communications RFPs.  High availability, voicemail, unified messaging, and unified communications are just some of the features of modern communications technology. If your organization is starting the process of looking for a new UC solution to replace your existing IP/PBX, then taking a look at the UC RFP results would be a great place for you to start.

For a comprehensive look at weighting, factors and TCO evaluations included in the Enterprise Connect UC RFP, download the whitepaper by David Stein.

Modernizing IT infrastructure and becoming a Smarter Enterprise

The need for modernization among IT departments is a trend that is becoming increasingly relevant as IT departments are constantly faced with generational shifts in technology. The pressures of modern business require that IT departments close the gap between yesterday’s IT implementations and tomorrow’s demands.

Organizations that fail to modernize will rapidly lose their ability to respond to changing customer needs. They will weaken their competitive positions in the marketplace. And most importantly, the gap between where they are and need to be will only widen, leading to an expensive and uncertain future.

With most businesses facing incredibly tight or shrinking IT budgets, taking the appropriate steps toward modernization will seem expensive. With a modernized platform, however, organizations can add new capabilities and enhance overall employee performance while reducing their electronic footprint, leading to increased savings over time.

What is a Smart Enterprise?

Smart enterprises leverage more converged IT technologies to optimize business practices, drive workforce engagement, and create a competitive edge. Merely leveraging a converged IT framework in your IT department means that you are on your way to operating a smarter, more efficient business. IT organizations can utilize four key areas of value and then assess their plan against:

1: Business Agility

Today, most workforces are mobile. As such, your applications and enterprise architecture should empower these mobile workforces. Creating a more adaptive and more programmable infrastructure will enable IT to be more responsive to your organization. Businesses in today’s world are always on, and as a result, you need to consider how your most critical services can adapt more naturally and automatically to the mobile and always-on workforce.

2: Cloud Delivery

Modern businesses need to be incredibly efficient. Cloud delivery provides businesses with the opportunity to flexibly deploy services and software more consistently across converged premises, cloud, or hybrid infrastructures. An enterprise IT business plan should consider how and when to deploy certain services in the cloud, when to operate them on-premises, and when to purchase them as-a-service.

3: Collaborative Communities

Today’s growing workforce demands rich Internet-style applications that are easy to access from anywhere and work consistently from any device.  Organizations who have built collaborative communities by providing powerful tools that deliver consistent and intuitive user experiences, converged applications, and distributed architectures are able to adapt dynamically to change and empower employees to their fullest extent.

4: Assured Services

Securing business information—protecting your company’s intellectual properties and digital assets—falls squarely on the shoulders of IT.  Add security with the need to assure business continuity, and you get a business that must consider greater infrastructure planning, high availability at multiple layers, a consistent and aligned security credential methodology, and which must validate automated archival methods.

Steps to Modernization

Competing in today’s business environment is about meeting challenges, making decisions, and innovating rapidly—using the best and most current technologies, tools and information.

Cloud services, mobile integration, real-time collaboration, and high availability are becoming essential ingredients for the smart and secure enterprise. They are part of a rapidly evolving technology foundation by means of which the best solution providers enable new approaches to how your businesses IT services are delivered and managed, allowing you new opportunities for growth.

Want to know more about IT Modernization?

In an upcoming post we will discuss Enterprise IT Modernization Strategies and their benefits. And, if you’re going to Enterprise Connect this year, be sure to come see us.  Our solution experts will be happy to discuss how our IT solutions can help empower your smart enterprise. 

Part One: Advanced Mobility, Software Defined Tools, and High Availability

With the start of the new calendar year fast approaching and businesses making plans to find new software and technology solutions for employees, now seems to be the perfect time to share the trends and technologies that we believe will drive productivity and build more flexible work environments for our customers in the coming year.

Many IT and Communications Trends from 2013 will be as prevalent this year as last. This portion of our two part blog series on The Smart Enterprise in 2014 covers returning IT and Communications trends that will help you maintain your competitive edge and keep current with the rapidly evolving Unified Communications technologies in today’s marketplace.

Advanced Mobility

As technology has progressed, employee presence in the workplace has evolved. In 2014, employees are going to continue to be mobile, and will be traveling or telecommuting even more than the previous year. These employees will continue to need access to data and applications in non-stationary locales.

As long as this trend continues, your employees will continue to require a fully-functional mobile work environment.  To today’s employee, location is unimportant, but presence and status remain crucial.

Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) capabilities offer communication services independent of access technique. FMC supports smartphones as an integrated extension of the company network, meaning it can be accessed from any location at any time via a WiFi connection. Mobile devices can then be used in conjunction with enterprise security credentials—thus simultaneously securing enterprise information and supporting ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) policies.

Software Defined Tools

Software-Defined tools are the definition of new improved standards for infrastructure programmability and data center interoperability. Driven by automation and cloud computing, software defined technologies provide you with simple, cost-effective tools that are built on collaboration.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN), for example, provides technology to extract network architecture and make network devices programmable.

The goal of SDN is to allow network engineers and administrators to respond quickly to changing enterprise conditions. In a software-defined network, a network administrator can shape traffic from a centralized control console without having to touch individual switches. The administrator can change any network switch's rules when necessary -- prioritizing, de-prioritizing, or even blocking specific types of packets with a very granular level of control.

This is especially helpful in a cloud computing multi-tenant architecture because it allows the administrator to manage traffic loads in fast, flexible, and efficient means.

High Availability

Numerous organizations depend on generic or specific IT applications in their day to day operation and services, which is why providing these businesses with solutions that provide continuous operation of essential systems is vital for us.

IT has become a matter of providing services 24 hours a day, 365 days a year across countries. As a result, IT systems need to be extremely reliable, and, the application of High Availability in IT systems becomes one of the most important implementations in IT strategies.

IT managers need to protect data and applications, from sudden hardware, OS and application failures to sudden natural disasters. To achieve a high level of operational uptime, infrastructure components must be fault tolerant with the ability to recover from complex failures. This is all the more important in mission-critical environments, such as healthcare, banking, insurance, e-commerce or web services.

A virtualized infrastructure improves business continuity. A clustering solution can be key to continuing the workflow on standby systems without stopping business operations when failure strikes. This can be clustering software or fault tolerant server solutions delivering exceptional uptime through dual modular hardware redundancy. These servers provide continuous availability through hardware redundancy in all components: processors, memory, motherboards, I/O, hard disk drives, and cooling fans for optimal data integrity.

While some of these trends will accelerate, others likely won’t. NEC experts, however, expect all of these technologies and developments to help organizations drive productivity and bring new, powerful solutions to businesses everywhere.

Wondering what else NEC experts predict for next year? We’ll continue to uncover what IT and Communications will look like in 2014 in part two of our blog series on The Smart Enterprise. 

To learn more about these technologies, download our eBook: Smart Trends Enterprise Trends 2014: 10 Strategic Drivers that Will Empower the Smart Enterprise.

Many organizations are improving communications through the virtualization of real time applications such as voice and unified communications (UC). All the financial and practical benefits of traditional server virtualization still apply as companies consolidate voice and UC into their data center. Namely: reduced capital expense, improved efficiencies, reduced risk, plus the savings on operational expenses since voice and UC can be managed with all other business applications on shared infrastructure. While the concept of virtualization has been around for a long time, it continues to be a leading trend in the transformation of data centers as organizations find new ways to reduce costs and improve efficiencies.

While hardware and energy expenses are the obvious savings, organizations sometimes overlook the reductions in operating costs. These savings can be drastic, especially in highly distributed organizations. The ability to easily manage your voice and UC in conjunction with other business application simplifies administration. It makes server testing, deployment and policy compliance easier as installations can be created from standard images. There are also IT benefits as it relates to the support of remote sites. When you have dedicated servers for individual applications managed by remote staff it can get really expensive. The common server infrastructure and application can reduce the remote site IT support staff requirements. Additionally, backup or clustered instances of your telephony, audio/video conferences and unified communications applications at your remote sites can play a critical role with load balancing and fail-over. This can add tremendous benefits to your business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) plans.

Reduced costs

With virtualization there are a number of benefits seen when it comes to reduced costs. First, there’s reduced hardware expenses. Virtualization vendors once touted claims as high as 50 to 100 virtual machines on a single physical server, but, even if you go with a conservative 10:1 consolidation ratio, there’s still significant savings on hardware costs and maintenance. Now that leading voice and UC applications are offered as purely software-based solutions, you can add telephony, audio/video conferencing, unified messaging, contact center, etc. to your data center on the standard off-the-shelf servers you are familiar with.

Reduced power consumption is a nice added cost savings. Organizations can become more energy efficient through server consolidation as a smaller number of fully utilized servers consume far less power than a large number of under-utilized ones. Additionally, there are real estate, cooling, and backup power savings that go along with the smaller footprint, not to mention the aesthetics of a clean data center.

Improved efficiencies

Virtualized server environments have a number of advantages when it comes to improved efficiencies and simplified administration that are often not available with physical servers. Advantages like live migration, storage migration, fault tolerance, high availability and distributed resource planning help you maximize uptime of your critical applications like voice and UC. These virtualization technologies keep your virtual machines up and running and give them the ability to quickly recover from unplanned outages. The ability to easily backup and move from one virtual machine to another is one of the best business continuity benefits out there. Additionally, combining these software advantages with fault tolerant servers can create a rock solid environment where it’s needed.

In addition to business continuity, disaster recovery for your communications is greatly improved in a virtualized environment. By reducing the number of physical servers required to run your operation, you have a complete backup solution at a remote site as we mentioned above, or in the cloud at a co-lo facility or offered as a service from your system integrator. In the past, this type of backup solution was cost prohibitive for most. The DR site had to have the exact, often proprietary, hardware configuration as the production site. This can be very costly and an administration nightmare to keep in sync. Now, through virtualization, this type of DR plan is more affordable and easier to maintain. One thing to consider as you plan to virtualize your communications is how your vendor prices user software licenses. Make sure you are not paying for the idle voice and UC licenses that are part of your disaster recovery plan.

For those of us that have suffered from server sprawl, we know all too well how this begins. The server room starts off clean, tidy and with plenty of physical space, but one-by-one we continued to add additional applications that required a dedicated server. Critical applications like voice, contact centers and unified messaging once required isolated processing power, memory and storage space to satisfy business requirements. Now that these applications no longer require proprietary dedicated servers, IT departments can escape the server vender lock that once limited options. Virtualization provides an ideal way for organizations to minimize the number of servers needed. By creating virtual machines that meet the exact requirements, you can overcome the hardware limitation and latency issues that prevented the virtualization of real time applications like voice communications in the past.

There is one common theme across all IT organizations in today’s economic environment – to do more with less. Virtualization is a great way to improve your organization’s communications and provide higher quality services with less hardware, lower costs, and reduced administration hassle. Click below to learn how NEC’s software-based unified communications applications have advanced the virtualization strategies of numerous organizations.

In part one of our series, we took a dive into Gary Audin's eBook, entitled "The Ultimate Guide to Unified Communications."  Audin's publication gives an in-depth look on how to evaluate which UC approach is right for you. Read along as we dive deeper into the rest of the book and the pros and cons of the approaches to UC implementation.

7. Your Business Model Defines Your Communications Model

Your organization’s business model will have profound influence on the implementation of UC. Ask yourself the following questions in the process:

• Does my organization have the financial strength to use capital (CAPEX) funds or the ability to borrow the capital?
• If the capital is not available, does my organization favor expensing the costs of IT implementation through outside services?
• Does our IT staff have the training, knowledge, and experience to implement an on-premises system? If not, do we want to retain a VAR to implement and manage the on-premises system? 
• How are my competitors implementing UC?

8. The UC Implementation Decision

In the process of UC Implementation you may find yourself asking “should we install and manage our own system or use a completely outside cloud-based UC service?” The answer depends, not only on security, staffing and economics, but also what is the best method to introduce the UC menu of features to your users.

There are three possible solutions available to you for implementing and supporting Unified Communications (UC):

• Purchase a complete system and locate it at your data center(s)
• Use a service that is remote with access through a private network (MPLS) or the Internet
• Combine these solutions into a hybrid implementation, gaining the advantages of both

9. The On Premises Solution

Implementing an on-premises solution provides high levels of security and control, and lowers the implementation and operational risks. A major risk you can run into with a cloud service provider is service availability/reliability, since the cloud provider is not likely to include Internet access in their Service Level Agreement (SLA).

The major cost component of buying a UC system is the software licenses. Once the first year of ownership has passed, the primary costs to your organization are software subscription, maintenance, and data center facilities. These latter costs add up to far less than subscribing to cloud services over time.

10. Subscribing to Cloud Communications Services

If you’re facing budget constraints, it can make the up-front costs of implementing on-premises UC solutions from scratch a moot issue. Like many enterprises, you will likely want to avoid any new capital costs, making a cloud solution that is expensed with little or no capital impact more desirable. Why? Because the cost is fixed per month based on the number of users and the individule features used, so is a predictable and more easily budgeted operating expense.

Cloud based UC services can also be subscribed to by feature set, such as providing video collaboration for a single department, allowing greater flexibility for your organization when determining what UC features should be offered to what users. Many enterprises implement a few UC features to begin with, and observe their use to determine what the feature benefits and ROI will be for other areas within the enterprise.

11. The Hybrid Approach; Cloud plus Premises System

A hybrid solution allows your organization to get the best of both worlds. With a hybrid solution you can integrate functions that are required for the entire organization, while using the cloud to offer specific functions unique to individuals or departments. This capability occurs without the expense of enabling functions for departments that do not need them. If cloud costs begin to exceed the cost of on-site implementations, you can convert functions from the cloud to premises-based. The hybrid approach can also deliver business continuity failover services at a much lower cost.

As you move forward in deciding how you will implement Unified Communications within your organization, keep in mind that there is no right or wrong approach -- you have to choose what works best for you. If you are ready for a guide to UC, click below to download the eBook that includes a comprehensive checklist on evaluating the best approach for your business. The checklist highlights factors such as the financial, technical and staff support impacts each system can have on your organization.

Part 1
Whether you’re thinking about deploying a cloud, premises-based or hybrid approach to unified communications, there are a number of factors to be considered. Gary Audin, president of Delphi Inc. has authored an eBook on the subject of how to evaluate which approach is right for you. We’ve summarized his recommendations and evaluation process, as well as provided a link to the full eBook below. As with most anything, there are pros and cons to each approach. For this evaluation, Gary focused on the items that make up the bulk of the expense and therefore, are most likely of greatest concern to you. Since communications technology is becoming more software driven, it should come as no surprise that IP Telephony and Unified Communications (UC) software expense makes up more than 40% of a solution’s total purchase price while hardware is becoming increasingly commoditized. As a result, for organizations to remain competitive, they need to consider today’s best practices in leveraging their software-based investments.

1. Realizing the importance of software architecture
PC’s, laptops, tablets, and smartphones have made their way into our daily lives as invaluable devices that not only enable access to personal information, corporate directories and email, but to specialized applications that facilitate communications in healthcare, financial services organizations, educational institutions, government operations and nearly every aspect of our lives. When you deploy the right communications software architecture you can enhance business agility by:

• Easily growing to accommodate acquisitions, mergers and changing business environments
• Providing common software services with multiple use cases 
• Leveraging pre-existing enterprise commodity infrastructure 
• Supporting the growing population of mobile workers and the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend
• Delivering tailored solutions
• Offering multimedia conferencing and collaboration capabilities

2. Explore a software-based approach with UC
Unified Communications is all about multi-media communications and collaboration. A few benefits of UC are that it improves productivity, decreases costs, and can make your organization more competitive. Implementing a successful and attractive Unified Communications system can provide:

• A rich, consistent user experience that streamlines business collaboration
• Enhanced support for enterprise initiatives involving BYOD needs
• A service-oriented distributed software design that delivers agility and scalability
• A single business application that is easy to install, manage, upgrade, and support
• A software-based licensing model, which grants high value features and capabilities that enable agility, reduce complexity and lessen costs

3. Servers in the communications architecture
Communications and collaboration vendors have migrated from proprietary, hardware specific solutions to utilizing generic servers. Doing so reduces the hardware cost, supports a wide range of scalability, and allows the vendor to focus on enhancing features and functionality through the implementation of software rather than the design of hardware. Proprietary hardware is becoming a thing of the past. Enterprises today are looking for flexibility without having to be tied to a single hardware solution vendor. Communications servers are general purpose in operation and offer:

• Carrier-grade systems that can be upgraded in a non-disruptive manner
• Flexibility that is scalable and designed to support added functionality. 
• Openness due to the fact that the servers are based on industry standards, allowing different applications to be implemented as needed

4. Data center consolidation and virtualization
In any organization, the data center typically always has room for improvement and optimization. With no wiggle room in IT budgets over the past few years, IT departments are facing technical as well as financial constraints. There is a continuous effort to consolidate systems, thus reducing the costs of both the purchase and operation of data center functions.

Virtualization is one answer to this effort. Virtualization is the use of software that allows a piece of hardware, usually a data center server, to run multiple operating system images simultaneously instead of a server dedicated to each function and operating system. Studies have discovered that single application servers are commonly underutilized, with as little as 5% busy. Virtualization allows data center operators to increase the processing utilization and efficiency of a server. One server can operate in the same manner as multiple servers, thereby reducing purchase and operating costs. Whether you deploy premise-based, cloud or hybrid solutions for communications and collaboration services, virtualization can benefit your organization.

5. Adopting standards; benefits and limitations
An IT standard is an agreed-upon document that defines the performance, operation, interfaces, interoperability and measurement of a device, software, hardware, protocol, or language. It is typically beneficial to adopt a standard, but remember that a standard does not define the implementation of the technology; therefore there can be significant problems of design and financial issues that were not anticipated. For example, the standard can include so many options that vendors could each adopt a different subset of those options, making all the products unique and not interoperable. This happened with SIP trunking, where each vendor chose a different implementation approach. As a result, the SIP trunking providers had to customize their operation to each vendor. The solution: the SIPConnect SIP trunking solution that is now common for these implementations.

6. Disaster recovery/business continuity for communications survival
In the days when communications systems were implemented using proprietary hardware, you could expect the cost of backup/failover systems to nearly double your expense. As a PBX backup, the second failover system needed to be co-located on the same site as the primary system. The move to IP-PBX solutions alleviates cost by allowing the backup/failover site to be remotely located, adding further protection against major primary system failures. A common server can backup communications and collaboration implementations, even while being shared with other applications.

While there is no right or wrong approach to implementing UC for your organization, you do want to be sure to implement the one that best improves productivity and decreases cost. Stay tuned for our second post where we will continue to summarize the pros and cons of each method. In the meantime, download the full white paper to learn more.

In part one of this series, we dug into top trends to help your business increase efficiency and reduce costs. As we dive into the rest of the list, we’ll show you how mobile apps, storage management, social media and other evolving trends can give you a competitive edge.

VI. Mobile Applications

When mobile apps first made their appearance, the offerings consisted of strictly general productivity needs and information retrieval; email, calendar, contacts and weather information for example. Fast forward a few years and driven by increased public demand developers have created advanced mobile apps with capabilities such as GPS and location-based services, banking, order tracking, and ticket purchases. Not only has this increased functionality created a rise in the popularity of mobile applications, but it has generated a shift in the desire for mobility from strictly personal to business and corporate use. According to an Appcelerator survey, 55 percent of companies ranked mobility at the top or near the top of their priorities list, and 66 percent plan employee-facing mobile applications.

VII. Contextual Data, Analytics and Interaction

Contextual data spans the last mile of personal and business productivity: ‘Meta-information’ accompanies voice, video, chat and text communications to provide more comprehensive context for our interactions. Analytics is increasingly delivered to users at the point of action and in context. With the improvement of performance and reduction in cost to develop and implement, IT leaders can afford to perform analytics and simulation on nearly every action taken in the business. This change will lead to greater flexibility and agility within the workplace. For example, mobile workers are most efficient when they have immediate visibility of team member status so they can reach others in a timely manner when they need to do so. Contextually aware presence gives these employees the ability to receive information on content, tools, and services based on contextual information, such as the geographical location, personal preferences, and current activities of group members. To take it a step further integrating mobile devices with Unified Communications (UC) software allows end users to use mobile devices for collaborations and to locate other end users, whether they are on-site or off. This can be essential in healthcare where patients may require immediate assistance from medical staff or colleagues.

VIII. Big Data and Storage Management

As businesses of all sizes begin taking advantage of the capabilities of big data and analytics, they are also encountering the inevitable downside; complications when trying to store, protect, and manage the growing pool of data and related resources. Current methods require them to constantly configure, provision and upgrade their servers and storage devices, all the while technology enhancements put on the pressure to undergo migrations. So how can this be addressed? First, analyze the value of the data you have. Enterprises are deploying Big Data projects to leverage their current data and drive better business intelligence, product development and customer service. The surge in data will drive storage solutions to become fore flexible and scalable without the need for users to have a refined skillset in order to manage.

IX. Smart Energy

Information and Communications Technology will play an increasingly vital role in an energy efficient society, particularly given how essential it is to automatically balance energy supply and demand. Smart Buildings will achieve enhanced environmental and economic performance by producing, storing, efficiently managing and optimally controlling energy. Building energy management systems will play an increasingly vital role in these Smart Buildings. Energy waste is in turn minimized by obtaining location information for individuals to enable automatically controlling air conditioning and lighting. This is of particular interest to enterprises and data centers that will place an increasing focus on energy-saving technologies such as virtualization.

X. Social Media and Interaction

Although seen typically as a customer-facing technology only, many businesses have begun utilizing social media as an integrated element in their business process to facilitate improvement in all areas. From product testing and validation, exerting market influence, prospecting and lead generation to customer care and retention, the value of social media activities is continually increasing and expanding. The value of this activity is being quantified and routinely measured as part of the regular business process.

Companies are also reinventing their customer engagement models to more quickly and effectively respond to customer care issues via social media. Promotions are the top drivers of consumer engagement through social media, so businesses need to build new linkages between marketing and sales. Furthermore, customer support services increasingly use social media sites to share information with customers and provide more interactive support for them.

Hopefully these 10 tips have given you an idea on how you can empower your workforce without having to sacrifice additional cost or efficiency. Don’t forget to start at post 1 for the first set of tips, or to see the complete list, download the eBook.

Part I

Competing in today’s business environment is about meeting challenges, making decisions and innovating rapidly while using the best and most current technologies, tools and information.

Cloud services, mobile applications and virtualization are just a few components of a rapidly evolving technology foundation.  Check out this list of trends and technologies that we believe will drive productivity and provide businesses with superior customer service, a more flexible work environment and a competitive edge.

I. Unified Communications and Collaboration Reduce Latency and Drive Productivity

With organizations becoming increasingly fragmented, departments more flexible and employees more mobile, collaboration is a means of enabling them to work together in real time. Unifed Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) is a major breakthrough in enterprise communications, as it will drive productivity and increase flexibility across an organization. Latencies in all areas will be reduced as well, from development to logistics and customer response, thereby creating an informed and connected workplace. Advanced collaboration tools such as shared workspace, calendar coordination, and rich presence will support many business processes. As a result, collaboration between individuals and teams will intensify and improve in quality.

II. Mobile Connectivity is Key

In today’s fexible and fast-moving business environment, employees are never in one place for very long. Workers can be just about anywhere: at the offce, between appointments, on business travel or working from home. In many business settings, it has become more important to reach a specifc person regardless of their location. Additionally, more employees need a mobile device that supports all business telephone features and provides access to the Internet as well as business applications. Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) capabilities offer communication services independent of the access technique. With FMC, employees can use smartphones anywhere in the world as an integrated extension of the company network, enabling access to the central directory and switching from a cellular network to a Wi-Fi network. In addition, personal devices can be used in conjunction with enterprise security credentials – securing enterprise information and supporting ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) policies.

III. Open Architectures and Standards (such as SIP) provide Greater Flexibility

Globalization of business and technologies leads to solutions being comprised of components from multiple sources. UC&C solutions should be built on an open architecture that lets organizations leverage existing technologies. SIP is the foundation for integration of media modes, network devices, and applications across a common infrastructure to deliver advanced services and applications. SIP is a core communication component, which integrates with other advanced protocols to support a multimedia architecture and supports advanced communications across any device. It also enables virtual applications to be delivered from the cloud to support conferencing, messaging, voice, and collaboration.

The move to SIP trunking is signifcant because it enables organizations to reduce costs and offer new services. SIP trunking is beginning to replace local PRI lines and route external traffic to centralized data centers, allowing enterprises to lower the operating costs of IP technology while using their existing network resources more efficiently.

IV. Beyond Virtualization

Many organizations are turning to virtualization as the solution to their IT challenges. Virtualization accelerates deployment of new capabilities without needing to acquire new hardware. A virtualized infrastructure can improve your business through the minimization of capital expenses and operating costs.

It also helps reduce application testing requirements and compatibility issues while simplifying disaster recovery and mission critical solutions. Virtualization provides components to address end-to-end scenarios, like datacenter consolidation, business continuity and virtualized desktop solutions – ultimately providing you the benefits of a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

V. Hybrid Clouds

There is a bright future in the midst of hybrid clouds. Cloud computing is changing the enterprise’s approach to IT and communications, with more fexible architectures and cost structures. Modular applications enable you to pay for only those applications your business needs for a specifc period of time. These on-demand services allow businesses to better manage costs. Businesses are also turning to the cloud to enable more scalable and flexible business processes. While they use public clouds for less sensitive tasks, they prefer to use private clouds for their most vital processing tasks. 

Then there’s hybrid clouds, which are designed to quickly scale to a company’s needs. It makes it the ideal solution to load heavy projects, which cannot be easily handled by a company’s in-house servers. Hybrid clouds can be operated at all times, from any part of the world.

In part two, we’ll cover additional technology trends.  Download the eBook now for more details on empowering your workforce with these leading technologies.