Unified communications early adopters tout benefits

However, interoperability between UC products is one concern

ORLANDO -- Businesses presenting their stories at this week's VoiceCon Orlando 2008 are finding that unified communications can increase productivity, reduce costs, speed up customer service and even do good things for the environment.

The downside they see going forward is the lack of interoperability that will give them free choice among vendors, they say. (UC was a big theme at VoiceCon. Read more here.)

Dennis Schmidt, senior vice president for network services at Bank of America, delivered a keynote address on the company's 115,000 Cisco VoIP phone system, which has been integrated with UC gear to provide presence. (Compare unified communications products.)

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ORLANDO -- Businesses presenting their stories at this week's VoiceCon Orlando 2008 are finding that unified communications can increase productivity, reduce costs, speed up customer service and even do good things for the environment.

The downside they see going forward is the lack of interoperability that will give them free choice among vendors, they say. (UC was a big theme at VoiceCon. Read more here.)

Dennis Schmidt, senior vice president for network services at Bank of America, delivered a keynote address on the company's 115,000 Cisco VoIP phone system, which has been integrated with UC gear to provide presence. (Compare unified communications products.)

The phone system has cut the cost of supplying phone service to employees by 15% per seat on average, Schmidt said, crediting remote management that means fewer trips to branches to fix problems. With VoIP running over the same network as data, the bank has also saved on wiring up voice-only networks in new buildings.

The system has enabled workers who move from building to building to log into an IP phone and get their presence registered to the network, have their calls routed to the phone and get their voice mail. "It becomes their phone," Schmid says. Without VoIP, they would have to forward calls from a dedicated extension somewhere in the network.

The VoIP system is green, too, Schmidt said, citing shared workspaces that VoIP enables as translating into less office space to heat and cool as well as enabling employees to work at newly created suburban facilities built closer to where they live to reduce commute times and the amount of gasoline used.

The bank uses wireless handsets to improve productivity of bank managers who spend more time out of their offices with customers than they could when they had to run back to their desk phones. VoIP over wireless phones have not been deployed to everyone because Schmidt believes the technology is not ready yet.

One lesson learned by Bank of America was that setting up the right team is key. "Network transformation is less about technology and more intensely about the people, process and organizational transformation," Schmidt said. He recommended setting goals for how many VoIP phones will be deployed per month, then sticking to those goals.

In its internal deployment of VoIP, service provider Global Crossing decided to give its people a taste of the technology and see where they took it, said Michael Fuqua, senior vice president of information systems. It was given the broad goal of enabling departments to use communications to overcome business roadblocks.

The provider uses Microsoft Office Communications Manager (OCS) as its UC platform in tandem with Nortel and Polycom VoIP gear.

The deployment strategy was to deliver OCS to everyone, Microsoft Exchange collaboration software to 40% of workers, VoIP headsets to 10% and video gear to less than 5%. After that, it was up to business units to decide whether they wanted to invest money from their own budgets on the gear to boost their individual bottom lines, Fuqua said.