Feature Story

August 21, 2006

By Jenny Carless, News@Cisco

It's a commonplace scenario in business today: a worker checks his instant messaging (IM) application to see if his colleague is online. She appears unavailable, but he sends an e-mail, just in case. Then he calls her office and leaves a message. After a while, he calls her cell phone and leaves a message there, also.

Research shows that half of all workers each day have to use multiple methods to reach their colleagues, which ends up causing delays and missed deadlines about one fifth of the time. The challenge is figuring out which method is the best way to reach a particular person at a given time.

Communications Chaos

A plethora of communications devices and more people working from non-traditional locations (such as customer sites, hotels, airports and home offices) have created an atmosphere of communications chaos.

"Surveys show us that business workers feel it's difficult to manage multiple messaging sources - and that they get interrupted too often by people looking for them," explains Abner Germanow, director of Enterprise Networks Services at IDC. "So the ability to reduce the number of message pools and easily transition from one communication method to another is something many users would wholeheartedly support."

Riordan Maynard, CEO of Touchbase, a global technology services company and Cisco Unified Communications Specialized Partner that works with mid-sized multinational corporations, agrees.

"A majority of companies still operate disparate communications systems, both internally and with their customer base. And most operate them in a complicated fashion: they'll have a phone system for voice, a separate system for e-mail, etc.," notes Maynard. "It's very inefficient for the user, and it's costly to the firms that are supporting multiple platforms."

Curbing the Chaos

Unified communications offers an integration point across a number of different technologies and applications, to curb communications chaos and help enable effective virtual collaboration.

"Cisco Unified Communications incorporates a number of different types of devices - from cell phones to desk phones and softphones - with a number of different types of applications - such as IM, e-mail, video telephony, unified messaging and conference calls," explains Rick McConnell, vice president and general manager, Unified Communications, at Cisco. "It then brings them together in a way that helps enable companies to improve communications effectiveness and business processes."

"What is so exciting about unified communications, if done correctly and fully embraced, is that it fixes the issue of contactability," adds Maynard. "For large global companies with multi-disciplined teams, the 'anytime, anywhere' access it provides can have an amazing effect on an organization's ability to communicate and compete.

"It gives us the chance to radically transform the way our customers communicate, either with their client base or internally - to virtual teams and across multiple boundaries," he explains.

The ways unified communications can help enable collaboration are numerous. Examples include:

• Unified messaging - By integrating voice mail directly into an e-mail program, users can review all messages more efficiently. Also, by quickly reviewing a list of voice messages, they can find important messages faster than if they had to listen to them all sequentially.
• Presence - Unified communications allows a very powerful kind of network presence by combining the ability for users to define their preferred method of communication with system-based availability. Users can create lists of contacts who are allowed to know where they are on the network, those who can ring through to their office or cell phones versus those who must leave a message, etc. Network intelligence provides this important productivity benefit.
• Virtual contact centers - Call-center agents can work at home rather than in a centralized location. Likewise, contact centers can expand rapidly, on a virtual basis, because workers can be anywhere on an IP network.
• Rich-media conferencing - Virtual collaboration is facilitated by voice-, Web- and video conferencing.

Cushman & Wakefield LePage, a leading Canadian full-service commercial real-estate firm with more than 550 employees in major cities throughout the country, transformed its network to IP several years ago and recently completed a Cisco Systems Unified Communications system installation.

"Our agents are now more productive since they have easy access to their e-mail and voice mail, with no missed calls," reports CIO Ken Duff. "They really enjoy what the system has done for the company."

Management appreciates the flexibility of the Cisco IP Communicator softphone application, also. "When managers gather quarterly for the company's national meeting, they can just plug in their laptops, fire up their softphones and it is as if they are sitting in their own offices," he explains.

"In implementing (Cisco) Unified Communications, we are way ahead of our competitors," Duff adds. "Our employees are happier, management is impressed and our ability to serve our customers is improved."

The Network Matters

In March, Cisco announced the Cisco Unified Communications system, a new suite of integrated voice, data and video products and applications specifically designed to help organizations of all sizes communicate more effectively. The offering extends the power of the network to optimize applications, processes and resources and greatly simplify day-to-day collaboration.

"The network is the common denominator in pulling all the pieces together. If you can get all of the different silos of information onto a common protocol like IP and onto a standard network, then your technology vendors can start to do very interesting work in integrating all those communications cells," says IDC's Germanow. "But the trick is to have that common denominator."

"The network matters because every voice communication and every application - whether it's voice, data or especially video - is riding over that network," adds McConnell. "It requires an expertise and understanding to help ensure that packets are reaching their destination in the timeframe and in the fashion expected."

"Think about the e-mail world," he continues. "If a message arrives eight seconds after it might otherwise have arrived, no one cares. But a voice packet arriving even several hundred milliseconds after it was supposed to arrive - that's a problem."

As the unified communications world expands to include video as a common media type, it will become even more important that networks incorporate and include aspects of the communications mix when designed.

And as unified communications usage expands, companies can look forward to improved overall employee and organizational efficiency by reaching the right resource the first time and streamlining business processes. With a robust, well-designed and secure network, global enterprises can take advantage of the integration it offers to turn their communications chaos around and enjoy effective collaboration.

Jenny Carless is a freelance writer based in Santa Cruz, CA.