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Rakesh Sharma
NEW DELHI, INDIA: Unified Communication gives huge benefits to any organization as it integrates voice, mail, mobile, IM and video on a single platform. It helps you in building up improved communication channels amongst associates and partners, in increasing customer experience, reducing costs and increasing overall productivity.
Having an in-house UC solution can be good for large organizations, but for mid-size organizations, setting up the whole infrastructure might not be feasible. Here, managed UC can help in terms of saving costs and manageability.
Also, for organizations who want to focus only on their core business and want someone else to manage IT equipment support, such a a setup is quite feasible. However, before you proceed there are certain questions that should be asked. For example, is the in-house deployment and maintenance cost for UC too much? Does an in-house deployment lead to direct increase in cost to your customers? Such questions are vital and help you better in choosing between a managed and a hosted setup. Among other benefits of a Managed IT setup, a pertinent one is that you don't need to have an in-house expert on UC to manage your setup.
The vendor whom you would have outsourced your setup is most likely to be an expert in this domain and would suggest you the best and most cost-effective setup. There are couple of other benefits in opting for a managed setup. In a multi-vendor kind of UC setup, the cost of deployment becomes lower but the maintenance becomes complex. And for hardware support, one needs to call up different vendors. But in a managed setup, only one gateway is there for all issues and hence you have a simplified support mechanism. And for users, it hardly matters what kind of an environment they are working on at the backend so long as they get seamless connectivity.
UC in contact centers
As UC is being used by many MNCs for communication amongst branch offices, it has helped a lot in cutting down travel costs and other miscellaneous expenditure. The integration of presence has made communication much easier, as people know which is the best possible channel to connect to a person at any given time. Another reason why MNCs opt for such a setup is that it helps in maintaining the continuity of their business. Suppose, if network failure happens, even then a mobile user can get access to the UC equipment. And the employees within the organization can be transferred to some other place where they can simply connect to the hosted setup and start working without causing business downturn.
Apart from MNCs, contact centers are using UC as a managed setup for their businesses. Earlier, contact centers used to have a hosted setup for handling all queries that came from just one channel, ie a phone call, for which they had to implement their own PBX within their premises.
Later, as the channels of communication increased, people used SMS, email and IM apart from using phone calls. This led to the deployment of all these services individually into a contact center. At a later stage, it was found that it was becoming increasingly difficult to handle so many channels at the client end. Because there was no integration amongst all the channels, a client required to open different windows for different applications. Thus, the demand for UC gained traction in contact centers. The UC solutions have led to better productivity of employees as there is a single window for handling all channels. Employees can now handle clients and track them even if means of communication used are different.
Manageability and scalability
After the initial trials in the industry, it is now generally accepted that having a managed setup for contact centers is a good option. As the requirement for infrastructure changes over time, pay-as-you-use becomes the best option. For example, if at present the demand is to have a solution for 600 employees, then a company needs to have a setup infrastructure for 600 employees, but later if the demand decreases to 400 then the remaining 200 devices can't be thrown out. In case of a managed setup, the company can downgrade the infrastructure used, and save on costs. Also, if demand increases in the near future they can scale it as per their need.
The deployment of UC solutions doesn't mean installation of just a single server in your DMZ, it is the deployment of various technologies and then integrating them together. Hence, manageability of such a system becomes difficult and you need to have an in-house dedicated team to manage it. Now, that can cost you a huge amount each year. But in case of managed UC services, the ball is completely in the vendor's court. Hence, a company gets relieved from the task of managing the IT infrastructure and instead focus on the their core business.
