There are some interesting findings in a new “Benchmark Report” on Unified Communications from Nemertes Research, especially relative to return on investment and mobility. The report (registration required) is based on interviews with 240 IT leaders, so this is front-line intelligence.
ROI when it comes to UC is and has been perplexing. So much of what UC offers is greater productivity through collaboration and other tools – things that are all but impossible to measure, but you know them when you see them … and benefit from them.
Still, a lot of decision makers, the folks who sign those checks to the UC vendors, insist on hard-dollar proof to justify a migration. As Irwin Lazar, author of the report, puts it, “Companies continue to struggle to develop a business case based on hard-dollar benefits such as cost savings.” He adds, “UC business cases generally remain elusive outside of a few point examples,” such as eliminating travel through use of more video or turning to premises-based audio and web conferencing.
The report notes that for the IT leaders, what is much more important are the soft benefits of user satisfaction, system performance, mobility, and improved productivity. Interestingly, when asked to rank their satisfaction with their use of UC, the respondents who are focused most on cost savings report the lowest levels (2.0 on a scale of 1 to 5). The respondents who focus on user satisfaction report the highest, at 4.3.
We know the hard-dollar versus soft-dollar argument isn’t going to end anytime soon. That's why Sprint offers services such as SIP Trunking, Mobile Integration, Integrated Conferencing Enablement and Complete Collaboration to help enterprises find those dollar savings. Although everyone should be expected to be able to justify an investment in UC, it doesn’t always have to be about simply saving a certain number of dollars over the next six or 12 months.
As one unnamed IT manager who was quoted in the report described it, “Ultimately, our implementation is driven by the need to keep up with our competitors by improving agility and communications. Our challenge is in creating a funding model; most of the savings are on the soft side.”
As far as mobility is concerned, the report notes that 80 percent of the companies covered are either deploying, planning to deploy, or at least giving serious consideration to mobile device integration. That kind of enthusiasm is to be expected, because as we have argued here, without the mobility component, the Communications will never be truly Unified.
