inrich consulting

Unified Communications - “the haves and have nots”

Single number reach, Presence, Instant Messaging, Click to Call, single voicemail box… these are some of the key features that separate a telephone system from a Unified Communications system.

A valid question for the technology decision maker in a large enterprise is to ask “why do my employees really need this?”.

There are many answers, one of which may be “because your employees will expect these tools!”.

Imagine the office before email. Business still functioned. Imagine having an office now without email. What would your employees say then? It is probably a fair statement to say email is a necessary requirement in today’s business environment. Notice I never mentioned a business case.

Employees have email at home, they had it in their last job or when at school. Employees now expect and rely on email as a communications tool.

If we take the spread of consumer Internet based Unified Communications offerings then perhaps it is fair to assume that people will start to expect Unified Communications tools in the workplace. Perhaps not now, but in time I propose they definitely will.

For example take the biggest consumer Internet company of them all with Google’s GrandCentral (single number reach, single voicemail) and Google Talk (VoIP, presence and Instant Messaging). How many students (the employees of tomorrow) do you know without an Instant Messaging account?

British Telecom may be seeing the trend, or hedging their bets, through an Internet enabled service offering with RingCentral called BT RingCentral. A service for small office and home office that includes fax to email, single number reach and a single voicemail box.

While neither of the above are exactly a complete Unified Communications solutions they are definitely showing signs of evolving.

So perhaps decision makers in large organisations when considering the latest Unified Communications solutions available to their organisations will need to ask themselves “can I afford not to provide Unified Communications tools to employees?”.

Richard Tucker

Entry Filed under: grandcentral, ip telephony, ringcentral, unified communications