Mobile Unified Communications: Looking at the Benefits – and the Costs

A new Farpoint Group White Paper explores the features, requirements, and especially the total cost of ownership (TCO) of mobile unified communications. One surprising conclusion: MUC can be essentially free.

Unified communications can have, depending upon whom you ask, a very broad set of definitions, but the general idea is to logically merge multiple communications modes (say, wired and wireless, or multiple forms of wireless like cellular and Wi-Fi) and to present services running over these in a device-independent manner. In other words, virtualize the telephone and present the same set of services to users whether in the office or on the go. The concept is related to what we used to call fixed/mobile convergence, but without the dynamic handoff between those modes noted above.

A few months ago, I was speaking with Pej Roshan, whom I've known for many years, originally as the person in charge of WLAN security at Cisco, and now, via the acquisition of his previous company, Agito, as VP of Mobility at unified communications leader ShoreTel. Pej has been involved with mobility for a very long time, and our conversation was wide-ranging. But we kept coming back to issues relating to cost, specifically: what is the total cost of ownership of a mobile unified communications solution? I am a huge fan of MUC (an unfortunate acronym, that), but I hadn't spent much time on this question. So, a new Farpoint Group White Paper on the subject was in order, and it's now available for just a click and a little info.

I'll let you peruse the White Paper for details, but suffice it to say that it's usually not too difficult to build a TCO model for MUC. Capital cost is minimal (there's not really very much involved here at all), and operating expense can often be accounted for via a reduction in other operating expenses. The convenience of a MUC solution provides an inherent boost to user productivity, which really is the ultimate payback, of course, and an easy justification all by itself. But MUC can also be paid for simply via savings in items like cellular overuse (by moving traffic to Wi-Fi where possible), and a reduction in capital expense on items like desktop phones that are unnecessary for essentially-mobile workers. In short, though, depending upon policies and costs specific to a given organization, MUC can pay for itself very quickly. I'll have more on this once we've compiled data obtained from real users of MUC solutions.

In the meantime, my biggest wish is for MUC in the cloud, which would be perfect for smaller location-independent, infrastructure-averse firms like mine. But, then, given the cloudification of everything, such should only be a matter of time.

• Mobile Apps
• Smartphones
• fixed/mobile convergence
• mobile unified communications
• muc
• ShoreTel
• total cost of ownership