Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) is one of the few IT technologies with a "multifaceted" value proposition, in that it not only can lower costs, but can help streamline processes and form new ones. You may start out with cost reduction in mind, but along the way, you find ways to change and improve how you do business.

That was a key point made by analyst Zeus Kerravala of ZK Consulting, during a recent webinar on the subject of hosted UC&C. Also participating were Sprint's own Joseph Martin and Mike Velder of Cisco. If you missed it, you can replay it here. More...

How much could an enterprise save by implementing a SIP-based Unified Communications system? How about tens of millions of dollars? Sound enticing?

That kind of savings is not only possible, but likely, according to a new Webtorials paper titled Enterprises Stand to Recoup Millions Using UC. The same people behind this paper did a similar report a year ago, but where the original report focused on smaller businesses and projected savings for enterprises based on that, this one is targeted strictly at larger enterprises. More...

Before you can make an informed decision about return on investment (ROI) for a Unified Communications implementation, it is essential to know the scope of that investment. Obviously, it is more than just the up-front cost of the equipment you buy for a premises-based solution, or the ongoing cost of a hosted solution. More...

Part of our job here at Seamless Enterprise is to be always on the lookout for the freshest insight into convergence and Unified Communications. Sometimes that involves wading through sludge masquerading as insight; we do the dirty work and then can give you nice short summaries and save you vast amounts of time you don’t have anyway

Think of us as movie reviewers, who see movies so that they can warn you away from wasting $12 (not counting refreshments) and an evening of your time on some of them. More...

Having just wrapped up the last post in my series on selling technology to executives, I took one last look at what I wrote and realized that the proper cost accounting treatment I described in one passing sentence needed to be corrected. Checking in with my truly wonderful editor, Kristine, I learned that my final post had already gone to press. Rather than adding the insight to the original article, I decided it was the perfect opportunity to prove a key point in my series: when it comes to cost accounting, nothing is ever black and white and even “us finance guys” miss a digit once in a while (especially when  trying to offer a simple explanation for what is truly a mathematically complex concept.) More...

In this post I want to dive right into another real-world example about how WWAN (Wireless Wide Area Network), with its virtually free route diversity, provides an ROI to a variety of enterprises. To give you an understanding of some pretty complex cost accounting concepts that even CPAs struggle with, the retail industry offers a good model, since we all participate in it and it’s very easy to visualize even if we don’t know the business. More...

In recent blog articles, I have been focusing on “Selling Technology Investments to the ‘C’ Suite.” As regular readers know, I often talk about the “Three Pillars of Technology Investment” as a model to think in business terms about how ROI is achieved. In this series, I drilled down to talk more about hard and soft costs and benefits and about the amorphous and oft-misunderstood concept of sunk or “non-differential” costs. Now I want to turn to some real world examples of technology investment in Wireless WAN (WWAN) technology using these concepts. More...

I didn't spend much time in J-school (journalism) before I transferred to B-school (business), but I recall that it is not proper to return from a hiatus in writing without explaining why you have been away for so long. More...

As the fourth post in this series about selling executives on the ROI of technology investments, I am going to address one of the most complex areas of accounting: sunk costs. It’s easy to argue anything is sunk in the short run, but in the long-run, it can be very difficult to spot a truly sunk cost. More...

As the third post in this series about selling executives on the ROI of technology investments, I want to talk more about how one identifies and models soft costs and benefits. I have been using the analogy of a light switch and a light bulb to talk about hard costs and benefits. The thing that makes a simple light switch scenario “hard” is the high probability that an action (flipping a switch as an analog for making an investment) will indeed create the intended result (turning on or off the light resulting in a hard cost or hard benefit respectively.) More...