back to article The economics of UC

Building a business case for Unified Communications (UC) is not a clear cut process, with ROI numbers being difficult to derive, and sometimes not really conveying a meaningful value to the business. The endeavours of vendors and the corresponding push-back from businesses in this area is testament to how much of an issue this …

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  1. OffBeatMammal

    don't forget the user interface

    sadly most corporate UC solutions fail to offer the same user experience or capabilities of typical consumer products... so are not especially compelling for non-deskbound workers anyway.

    Skype for instance offers a pure VoIP client that (used to) run on a wide range of cellphones. It offers video calling and Outlook integration

    Digsby supports cross platform/service IM and Video

    Google Voice, Ribbit or Line2 offer proper VoIP on mobile, call forwarding, hunt groups, automated (though sometimes laughable) speech to text message taking

    Apple - with the iPhone - proved very clearly that an Enterprise solution today needs to take a long hard look at the user experience before simply mandating technology that looks good on paper otherwise you'll end up with work-arounds and departmental deviations that will just cause trouble down the line.

    In some cases that means Skype or similar is a better fit than an Enterprise UC product ... so those vendors need to lift their game and quickly if they want to justify their price point

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