VoiceCon: It's all about the savings

ORLANDO -- This week's VoiceCon Orlando was just as much about how to save money as it was about the hottest technology — unified communications — and, in fact, UC was touted as a way to go about saving money.

UC can get rid of desk phones, make multivendor legacy PBXs work together, increase worker productivity, decrease sales cycles and improve customer satisfaction with contact centers, the roughly 5,000 attendees at the show were repeatedly told in keynote addresses, sessions and on the show floor.

Despite the bad economy, the estimated attendance was about the same as last year, and the number of companies exhibiting was 117, compared with 127 last year, with the 10 that dropped out doing so because of budget cuts, a show organizer says. Even so, faring about as well as last year was viewed as a victory, or as the organizer put it, "Flat is the new growth."

One user says enough of the hype about UC is true that after a 500-person trial of Microsoft's Office Communication Server 2007, he plans to roll it out to 17,000 more users by May. "The goal is to increase productivity and shorten sales cycles," said Anreas Arrigoni, head of collaboration services for telecom carrier Swisscom.

Arrigoni says the gear is responsible for a 20% off the time it takes to close deals and returns 20 minutes per day to every employee using it.  

Kraft Foods is trialing Avaya UC to see how users will change the way they work when presented with UC tools. The company moved a 500-member team into an open workspace with no wired phones or data network and relying on Avaya UC, said Thomas Behnke, head of global managed network services for the company.

The office provides power, but workers use wireless laptops, iPhones and even wheel around their own file cabinets. Kraft is working with Avaya for a native iPhone application that will support full UC collaboration, Behnke says. And the company is saving money by through reduced infrastructure costs and moving from TDM carrier services to Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), he says.

While definitions vary, UC is the blend of voice, video, instant messaging, conferencing, collaboration and applications that can enrich users' communications and help businesses work more effectively, and vendors tried to put a recognizable face to the concept.

Demonstrations ranged from Avaya's mashup of its UC platform with Facebook that creates an online sales-support tool, to Cisco's recording of a high-definition video distributed in formats appropriate to high-definition devices as well as PCs and handhelds, to IBM's integrating phone systems by three different vendors into a single system that shared presence information.

With cost cutting the main message of the show, most of the high-profile presentations couched the savings as a short-term benefit of the initial investment in UC, with greater rewards to be reaped later. "Align your company for the rebound," said Gurdeep Singh Pall, vice president of Microsoft's unified communications group. "You have to be ready for the future. When the climate changes you will need to leapfrog your competition."