Using existing infrastructure to improve on ROI

With financial instability in the market proving to be challenging for companies of all sizes, business leaders are looking at ways to cut costs while at the same time keep their productivity and revenue high.

Unfortunately, says Marius Vermeulen, Cisco technical specialist at Tarsus Technologies, few organisations are thinking creatively about how the infrastructure they already have in-house can affect increased cost-savings.

"One such example," Vermeulen says, "is the evolution of an existing VOIP into a fully-functional video conferencing solution that allows companies to cut down on the travel expenses incurred when managers need to visit branch offices."

This is a great project to embark on since it sees a very quick return on investment, he says.

"The capital outlay that a company would have to endure in order to install a Cisco Unified Video Advantage and make a substantial difference in their travel budget is relatively small - often all it requires is an inexpensive addition to the client-side telephony equipment they already have installed on their employees' desks," he says.

Vermeulen says the most common Cisco IP phone range in use today is the 7941 handset. Additionally, these devices can be easily and inexpensively upgraded with a camera and software that costs no more than R1 200 per device.

"It works out to an incremental cost of about 22% over the standalone handset, a figure low enough to ensure that within a three to six month period, full return on investment has been reached," Vermeulen adds.

"Considering that a similar solution is required at the branch, we're talking about a total cost of somewhere in the region of R2 400 for a head office to connect to a branch," he says. "Once the solution has been installed at the head office, the company only needs to foot the bill for each branch they bring online with video.

"By contrast, a single trip to a branch office would cost the organisation airfare, accommodation and possibly car rental. Once those figures have been tallied up, going for a video-upgrade to their VOIP handsets becomes a relative no-brainer," Vermeulen explains.

Vermeulen says that generally there's not much of a need for the WAN links to be upgraded between the head and branch offices - this particular video solution will use between 50kbps and 1.5Mbps of bandwidth per call (depending on quality), where a conventional voice call is in the 16kbps range.

And since companies seldom have a WAN link below 4bmps in capacity, there's quite a bit of headroom in the offing.

Vermeulen says, however, that this seems to be one of the best-kept secrets in the market today.

"And it really shouldn't be - it offers operational cost-savings from the word go and has the ability to make an even bigger difference in the long-term," he adds.

"If resellers knew the kind of value they would be able to add to their customers' lives by recommending this route, I'm sure more of them would be capitalising on the opportunity to do so."

According to Vermeulen, that's one of the reasons why Tarsus is making as much noise as possible about this solution and doing its utmost to ensure that its resellers remain abreast of developments such as these.

"We're convinced that these efforts will reap rewards, not just for us and our resellers, but for the party that really counts, namely, the customer," he concludes.