People matter. Imagine you are on the go, just arriving to a customer meeting and you have to catch up on a team meeting from Singapore – and all of this has to be done on your smartphone. You want this to work effectively, right?

This changing workplace – a mobile workforce needing to work on the move using their device of choice with increased expectations of video communications and social collaboration, as well as more team-based workflows amongst employees – is forcing enterprises to embrace new methods of communicating and collaborating.

I believe there are four key pain points driving the adoption of Unified Communications (UC) which if addressed, will show significant Return on Investment (RoI) in both cost and productivity – and they all relate to the people who are doing the communicating.Waiting for Information – It’s all about getting the right information to the right person at the right time without wasted effort in communication. We have all been in the situation where we’re waiting on a response from a colleague, duplicating the same communication via a different channel. What if we could get rid of the need to make unwanted communications?Customer complaints due to lack of communication – Customer frustration and complaints are often due to a company’s own internal communications inadequacies. When a customer calls in to one department with a complicated query, it’s essential that you’re able to send that query to the right department immediately. A lack of communication between departments and the inability to contact the correct person can cause customer dissatisfaction and complaints.Off-site Productivity Loss – Yes, we all have an increasing mobile workforce. But you might often find that your employees lose productivity and responsiveness when off-site at that all-important customer meeting, and so their outputs might be significantly reduced when working from a location other than one of the company’s offices.Challenges to Collaboration – BYOD, the increase of Generation Y in the workplace, social media such as Facebook coming into the workplace, as well as increasingly mobile employees –can all result in complex delivery and multiple vendors. If you’re unable to access the tools required at the time you need them, the result can be very little true collaboration across the enterprise.

Communication is essential to every business process, and the real RoI from UC is when communication and collaboration is streamlined, human latency reduced or even eliminated, and employees can be more productive, efficient and responsive – working as they expect to work. So with a wider enterprise focus, UC can lead to quicker time to market as well as reduced project and design time.

The ‘hard’ cash benefits of UC can be seen in many ways – in the ability to manage business process latency, resulting in speeding up communications and project conclusions; in the decrease in personal intervention resulting in a reduction in maintenance costs; and of course in the reduction of operational costs in terms of travel, infrastructure and communication.

The budgets are there

UC is predicted to grow from $26.2 billion this year to be worth almost $38 billion by 2016 (IDC). One recent Ovum survey, entitled ‘The Future of Unified Communications & Collaboration‘, asked IT managers and those responsible for a UC&C strategy whether they have plans to implement at least some UC&C in the next two years. A huge 80% responded positively to this question, but even more interestingly, 78% – almost the same percentage – also claimed that they had dedicated budget to do so.

And we are Open for UC now

Our own OpenTouch™ Suite enables native multi-party and multimedia collaborative conversations on any device – smartphone, tablet, deskphone, PC – the options are endless. We can deliver all the multimedia, multi-party UC benefits run on a single server, meaning that costs are significantly reduced – in some cases up to a third of the market price. With lower TCO and payback time, as well as cloud-based delivery, this becomes much more affordable for SMBs and large enterprises alike.

UC is tied to every business process, helping companies transform their businesses and the way work is carried out and completed, and will help to build competitive differentiation as a result. I believe we are a company in the right place, with the right solution – at the right time.