UC Case Study Shows Remarkable GainsUC Case Study Shows Remarkable Gains

The company expects to save $1 million in 2010--or 1% of its total operating expenses.

On November 9th, I'll be participating in a Frost & Sullivan eBroadcast on many of the best practices associated with unified communications. One of the other speakers is Mike Taylor, CTO at Strategic Products & Services--a systems integrator with significant experience in deploying UC. Mike will be offering insights into what he’s learned after years spent helping customers install and use UC technology from Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, Polycom and other vendors. He suggests companies take five key steps before deploying a unified communications system:

Start by identifying a need, a benefit or a risk
* Productivity improvement (shortened response times, process improvement)
* Cost savings (shared office space, nimble processes)
* Business Continuity (plan for the unthinkable)

Do your research, talk to multiple vendors, peers
* Don't be led down an expensive path by a single vendor
* Leverage a partner, sooner, rather than later

Stop, take a good look at what you are doing
* What it will cost
* What it will change

Don't get caught up in the hype
* Don't compromise something important, for something cool

Then get excited
* Users love being effective

Also on the call will be Urban Gillis, Director of North American Sales at Jabra. Jabra sells headsets, which can stand as a critical component of any UC implementation. But it also uses UC internally, and has seen remarkable cost savings and productivity improvements as a result.

The company, which is based in Copenhagen but has 850 users across 20 sites, including home offices, has removed all desktop phones from corporate headquarters. Why? According to Anders Boyer, CFO of Jabra’s parent company, GN, "The business case was almost too good to be true--and it proved to be even better than that." The company deployed Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 in April, 2009, with basic functionality including IM, presence, video and voice. Six months later, it introduced conferencing to end users, and 12 months after that, it is using the system to handle inbound and outbound calls.

The total cost of the deployment--including $168,000 worth of headsets--was less than $250,000. The company expects to save $1 million in 2010--or 1% of its total operating expenses.

That's the short version of the eye-popping story. For more details, and to pepper me, Mike and Urban with questions, please register for the event here