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Thursday 24 March 2011 DIGITALIRELAND INSIGHT 5 Unified Communications ‘Unified


communications provides a whole raft of different sets of return on investment – your business communicates better, your colleagues


collaborate better and individuals become more efficient’


Jeremy Showalter, IW business group lead at Microsoft Ireland


place a traditional phone system (PBX).” One of the problems in bringing unified communications to the irish marketplace is few businesses understand it. Showalter agrees and believes there is work to be done in terms of education. “Too often SMes are not aware of these ca- pabilities and not aware that they can adopt these services easily and cost effectively, though we are seeing significant organic growth of these types of services through our current BPOS offering and significant inter- est in the Office 365 offering,” he says. “SMe companies are focused on growing


their businesses, and often that is related to improving how they communicate and how quickly they can communicate with their cus- tomers, suppliers and partners.” “One of the barriers is the culture changes


associated to the work styles unified com- munications enables. for instance, are firms and managers comfortable with employees working from anywhere? do firms have the vision to think about their traditional tele- phony options in new ways or are they held back by legacy PBX systems?” Showalter sees cloud computing as a sig- nificant enabler for unified communications. “With previous generation services like Live- Meeting in the market for many years and now with Office 365 we expand those com- munication capabilities with a full roadmap to deliver all unified communication capa- bilities via cloud options like Office 365.” damovo country manager Mary Bradshaw


believes that more and more organisations in ireland are switching on to unified com- munications. They see the value in making the office universal and equipping workforc- es to communicate in the office and on the road, she says. “it’s true integration. it’s the integration


of the full suite of communications tools in real-time into one single intuitive user inter-


face, whether you are on a notebook PC, sit- ting at your desk or on a mobile device walk- ing around. This is the technology that does that efficiently. “in terms of the return on investment for


the SMe, it puts everything into one reposi- tory and you can be contactable and in touch via one device if you want – there’s no split between PC or mobile. “Large organisations are using this in a big


way, but to be honest it has huge benefits for SMes in the same way, improving the way people and systems interact and collaborate. Putting all your communications into one single device like a smartphone, for example, makes it so much quicker, dynamic and ef- ficient, and to become lean and efficient it is about improving effectiveness. “You could accomplish more in a single


click rather than picking up a phone or leaving voice message. Access to presence technology will tell you whether someone is available or unavailable. You can send mes- sages over iM, click into an email or start a video conversation. “Unified communications is convergence.


All those technologies that used to sit aside from one another – phone systems, email, CRM, workflow – can all be accommodated in the one place to enable simpler collabora- tion, better customer service and, ultimately, providing a better service to your own busi- ness.” Many firms are beginning to get rid of


their old PBX systems and access unified communications as a managed service, Brad- shaw adds. “Why do you need these systems on prem- ises? Can’t you go into the cloud! “Unified communications provides a whole


raft of different sets of return on investment – your business communicates better, your colleagues collaborate better and individuals become more efficient,” she says.


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