As real-time telephony becomes just one of many business communications options for person-to-person contact through flexible unified communications (UC) services, enterprises will find many ways to achieve a return on investment, or ROI.
Aside from the flexible use of different communications modes that UC will enable, however, the biggest business value of UC may well come from its ability to facilitate communications dynamically and flexibly with people who are not in the same physical office or within the same organization (business-to-business, or B2B). UC has maximum business value to an organization when employees actually use it frequently in doing their jobs, wherever they happen to be, but when do they do that?
As people increasingly work and do business online with anyone, from anywhere, the need to interact efficiently with people remotely, especially across organizations, is also increasing. This trend is not only reducing the use of physical face-to-face meetings in favor of audio and video conferencing, but it is also increasing the use of real-time messaging in the form of instant messaging (IM) and presence information. In fact, IM is rapidly becoming the UC starting point for any real-time voice or video connection, rather than tradtional "blind" phone call attempts that fail because the recipient's phone is "busy" or doesn't answer.
End-User Adoption of UC Is Not That Great
Recent market studies show that organizations are not fully realizing UC benefits, even though the technology is improving and becoming more easily available as a service (UCaaS). One reason is that UC implmentations still suffer from low end-user adoption and usage. One recent market study showed that only 24% of all UC implementations had no problem at all with end-user adoption. The lower the user adoption of UC capabilities, the lower the ROI associated with increased business process productivity and reduced communication friction of email and phone calls.
This may happen because most end users will not find the UC value proposition to be enough simply for communicating with people within their office or their own department. However, they may find UC much more useful if they can stay in touch and have real-time access to external colleagues (partners, customers, field workers) with whom they interact on a regular basis. Today email and blind phone calls are no longer considered time-efficient modes of communications, compared to presence-driven real-time communication modes to reach external or mobile contacts.
However, the big problem with current IM technology and presence federation is that it was designed to work internally with end users who all use a common platform or service provided by their organization. Things therefore get difficult when dealing with people outside of the organization, who may be on different UC platforms or services.
Driving Up Internal End-User Acceptance of UC
To increase the value payoff from implementing UC capabilities, a growing list of enterprises are focusing on encouraging person-to-person contact between people inside and outside of the organization (partners, suppliers, customers).
Leading-edge enterprises are building UC-to-UC collaboration into sales, product development, procurement, marketing, and logistics business processes. The results are increased communication productivity, faster time-to-market, and reduced telephone charges.
The challenge, though, is in making flexible real-time contacts with people outside an organization as seamless as having real-time communications with internal coworkers.
If your organization suffers from low end-user UC adoption, one sure way to increase adoption is by increasing your B2B UC collaboration activity with federated presence services.
NextPlane's UC Exchange Closes the Federation Gap
Depending on the platform, the gateways provided by UC vendors may offer limited interoperability. Even if federation is established, presence states can be unreliable or inaccurately mapped. Inviting external colleagues into multi-party chat sessions may not be supported, and escalating chat sessions into voice and video calls will also be out of the question. Even cloud-based UC services, despite their advantages, are, in fact, "walled gardens" with restricted external federation capabilities.
To tackle these challenges companies are evaluating a number of options, including NextPlane UC Exchange, which provides a secure, scalable, any-to-any federation service that enables B2B UC collaboration with partners between disparate UC platforms including Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, BroadSoft, Unify, Mitel, Genband, OpenFire, and others.
UC Exchange allows presence, chat, multi-user chat, voice and video calling between users and their external colleagues as if they are on the same UC platform. In addition, UC Exchange handles little things that can make a big difference to end-users, such as custom presence, activity-based presence, user tagging and "is-typing" notifications.
The time is now for all organizations to gracefully migrate to UC services, but to maximize the value and efficiency of such a move, it must include the benefits of federated presence with people in other organizations (mobile and desktop users), not just internally.
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