Promises of slicker operations and cost savings are spurring on the worldwide migration to centralise and consolidate enterprise communication and collaboration infrastructures. As organisations the world over face economic and competitive pressures to cut costs and move faster, top organisations are leading the charge to strategically design and plan their architectures now.
That's according to Dimension Data's Global General Manager for Converged Communications, Craig Levieux, who points out that it's no longer a case of if, but when. “The migration from decentralised TDM voice to centralised IP Unified Communication and Collaboration (UC&C) environments is an inevitable reality. It calls for an overarching strategic architectural approach to support the move.”
The power of UC&C integrates voice telephony and video communications with other enterprise systems. Such integration with directories, unified messaging, instant messaging and Presence plus integration to customer relationship management systems, fixed mobile convergence applications and others, creates the potential to drive transformation and deliver tangible business benefits.
“Centralised architectures deliver cost savings and their ability to transform businesses can improve collaboration with customers and shorten time to market,” notes Levieux. “Companies are finally seeing that UC&C goes beyond cost savings to deliver incredible organisational benefits and enable them to do business in a different way.”
He explains that the pace of migration depends on many factors and typically involves looking at end of life dates for existing infrastructures and whether the topology capacity and quality of existing wide area networks (WAN) supports centralisation.
Modern collaboration and communications infrastructures are better for business continuity. They deliver improved resiliency and flexibility and increase mobile access to company applications and information,” adds Levieux. “Though this is a multi-year journey for most organisations, we expect to see companies looking at how existing infrastructures and networks support real-time traffic.
“Companies will also need to look at their organisational structures, staff mobility profiles, their culture and their strategic initiatives that are linked to business transformation imperatives.”
Levieux points out that while the pace of migration may differ between organisations, the advantages of UC&C extend beyond improved management and efficient operations. “In addition to improved resource use through better scalability and less unused capacity, administration is simpler and upgrades are easier to manage through centralised core processing.
Further benefits include extending user mobility, better investment protection and the provision of new features for specific user groups through a centralised system. Governance is also improved through centralisation and helps drive the costs of operations and security down - a challenge for most decentralised models.
Levieux says operational cost savings are a major benefit to companies. With potential savings in the region of 20% - 30% of overall telecommunications spend, companies are evaluating how technology can enable business transformation and drive the business case for change.
Lower overall IT procurement and day-to-day IT operations costs help place business issues in context. UC&C helps slash business costs such as travel and real estate and aligns with organisational objectives to reduce carbon footprint and innovate to improve business processes.
“We also expect consumption models to change,” adds Levieux. “Companies exercise more flexibility in terms of how they buy - today's model of capital expenditure on infrastructure will be supplemented by utility pricing models, delivery out of a public cloud and hybrid scenarios.”
To unlock the benefits of improved productivity and optimised business processes, most organisations will traverse through centralisation on the journey to integrated unified communications and collaboration (UC&C). It is easier and cheaper to integrate after centralising call processing and collaborative applications.
Levieux adds: “There is no time like the present - companies can pave the way for technology migration now by consolidating maintenance contracts and outsourcing to cut costs and boost management consistency.
“The question of whether to migrate is no longer in doubt. Organisations have to work out the design of their architectures to achieve a centralised model. This means looking at the organisation's strategy, objectives and needs and working out how UC&C can match them.”
He notes that vendors are already gearing up to deliver these advantages to businesses across the globe through session managers and increased virtualisation of real-time applications. Most are expanding the functionality of the collaboration portfolio to include voice, video IM and content management as one package.
Levieux suggests companies start by thinking about how to manage this environment through careful planning. “The reality of an integrated approach is a potentially complex ecosystem of integrated applications, which is why discipline and maturity of management is so important.
“As the future of telephony migrates to IP, the boundary continues to blur between voice and video,” adds Levieux. “We believe that the consolidation of voice and video applications into a converged infrastructure is as inevitable as the centralisation, consolidation, simplification and virtualisation of the voice infrastructure. Duplicating the efforts and costs of managing voice and video over the same network makes no sense. Integrating voice and video is the obvious solution and expert partners can help companies do this.”
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