Unified Communications

The concept of voice and data existing on the same network has been around for years but with advancements in hardware, the stabilization of IP telephony and the lower costs in technology, unified communications is a growing industry. Technology has matured to a point where businesses are finding it cost-effective to consolidate their networking capabilities rather than maintain separate voice and data networks. Currently, voice and data are the most popular combination, but businesses are including video more and more into their converged network plans.

Unified communications on a converged network allows organizations to improve productivity and workforce efficiency by allowing your employees to:

• Listen to email over the phone
• Check voice messages from anywhere Internet access is available
• Video on demand / video conferencing / video presence

When you consider unified communications, the biggest challenge facing managers today is creating a cost analysis or ROI. The definition of ROI from www.investorwords.com is: "Return on Investment. A measure of a corporation's profitability, equal to a fiscal year's income divided by common stock and preferred stock equity plus long-term debt. ROI measures how effectively the firm uses its capital to generate profit; the higher the ROI, the better."

• What will the technology costs, not only to deploy but to support? There is no simple answer to this question. In calculating an ROI, you must consider the following:
• Elimination or reduction in toll charges between offices, regardless of distance
• Reduce time and expenses for inter-office moves, adds and changes
• Scalability ? add on additional functionality to meet new requirements
• Increased employee productivity

Voice:
Utilize your infrastructure to maximize the tools your already have. With seamless integration with applications such as Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes, as well as add-on features, enables your employees to access email and voicemail from any location.

Contact Center:
With unified communications, organizations have the flexibility to setup virtual or physical contact centers to received customer calls. Below are some of the benefits:

• Quickly routes calls to the highest skilled agent through intelligent call routing
• Provide agents with detailed customer information as the call arrives
• Minimize time a caller is on hold
• Seamlessly incorporate remote agents into the contact center
• Reduce abandoned calls and wait times
• Provide advanced features like CTI, hot seating, call intercept, etc.
• Detailed reporting capabilities

Video:
With high-quality video now available to the desktop, you can develop virtual training sessions and collaborative meetings, saving time and expensive travel costs.

Employees want to access content when and where they want it. The Cisco Content Delivery System (CDS) allows service providers to meet these demands from today?s savvy consumers.

Help users quickly browse, search, and view digital media with technologies that deliver live Webcasts and on-demand video to your audiences. The Cisco Video solution fits easily into your organization's existing network and IT infrastructure.

Presence:
Cisco's Unified Presence is a critical capability that helps you realize the full value of a Cisco Unified Communications system. It collects information about a user's availability status and communications capabilities, including whether you are using a communications device such as a phone at a particular time or have Web collaboration or videoconferencing enabled on your system.

e-velocity can help you understand all the features and functionality available to you and the best approach to meet your organizations requirements today and into the future.

For More information on Unified Communications please click here.