When considering a single communications platform (Convergence) before reviewing the technology involved, you must focus your thoughts on what impact you want to make across your organisation, what business benefits and new ways of working you want to employ and how you want to reach out to customers or facilitate greater accessibility.
Senior executives are challenged with maintaining (or even reducing) costs, complexity and risk, whilst at the same time increasing innovation, capacity, employee productivity and security.Convergence has a major role to play in delivering solutions to these key issues – with real business benefit:
Reducing Costs
The benefits are much deeper than reduced call charges or IP transported inter-site voice calls, at no extra cost.A multi-location business can address their 'Total Cost of Ownership' (TCO) model through reduced connectivity, infrastructure and administration costs.
Reducing Complexity
Basing all your applications (including voice) on a converged IP infrastructure allows all your applications as well as the core network to be managed from one point reducing TCO and IT resource requirements.
Reducing Risk
One overall Service Level Guarantee (SLG) can ensure voice quality at a similar level to standard PSTN traffic across all connections within the network including remote offices or employees' homes.
Increasing Innovation
A converged network can enable greater flexibility.Infrastructure changes made quickly and in line with business objectives – with pace.Convergence allows businesses to support their strategies and objectives by deploying 'Applications over IP' across their organisation, rapidly.
Increasing Capacity
Given a limited ICT budget, convergence allows a business to increase the reach and capacity of their network – efficiently.Business can now augment their network architecture and through reduced costs, increase the availability of access to the corporate LAN.
Increasing Employee Productivity, Business Continuity & Security
Remote sites (and employees) can securely take advantage of all the data and voice applications that traditionally have only been available to the large site.Fast access to applications reduces employee idle time, promotes cross team collaboration and greater employee empowerment – whilst aligning to the latest EU legislation and working time directives. Additionally with greater connectivity flexibility disaster recovery plans can be reviewed.
With Convergence, working environments are changing.Remote/flexible working and virtual contact centres are becoming common place.At the centre of these changes are better communications, VoIP solutions, collaboration and more efficient data/idea sharing capabilities.
However, if an organisation doesn't have a formal policy for remote working the myriad of ways employees communicate when out of the office may lead to staff inefficiencies (e.g. productivity), hidden costs (e.g. unnecessarily high mobile phone bills) and pressure on critical support resources.
To avoid this it is essential to facilitate access to all the functionality that staff have in the office, whist away from it.In particular cost effective access to the following:
To drive these it is essential to embrace convergence to deliver information out or a simple access point for information to be made available to all.
