The UCStrategies Experts share their expertise in bylined articles, opinion pieces, blogs, and podcasts, to define unified communications, educate you about unified communications technologies, and help you make informed decisions about unified communications solutions.
UCStrategies.com defines unified communications as “Communications integrated to optimize business processes.” The definition of unified communications narrows significantly when you can read and hear about real-world examples that other companies are implementing right now—and apply them to your situation.
This section offers learning tools to help you plan your unified communications implementation.
This section provides a practical, vendor-independent service to any Enterprise that is seeking the benefits of Unified Communications. How do you pull everything together to implement unified communications? Use the tools in this sequence to define unified communications for your business.
The Unified Communications industry changes daily. We keep track of it for you.
UCStrategies is an industry resource for unified communications enterprises, communications vendors, system integrators, and anyone interested in the growing unified communications arena.
A supplier of objective information on unified communications, UCStrategies is supported by an alliance of leading communication industry advisors, analysts, and consultants who have worked in the various segments of unified communications since its inception.
Preparing the budgets for your Unified Communications solutions is logical and straightforward if you have prepared a UC Action Plan. With that plan you will be able to get price quotes from the suppliers and prepare your estimates for staffing, facilities, training, professional services and supporting technologies for your plan (see the Table of Contents of the UC Implementation plan in the UC Action Plan section).
As three guidelines for budgeting, we suggest the following:
1. The article from BCR Magazine, "De-Mystifying VoIP and UC Pricing Trends." The article looked at the shifts in pricing on a per-user per-year basis (based on a three year life cycle). To date, the industry prices have been tracking to very closely to the forecast of a continuing decline in UC prices.
A key illustration from that article is shown below. Detailed explanations and numerical tables are in the article.
2. UniComm Consulting has analyzed pricing of a number of vendor configurations for both complete Voice over IP (VoIP) with Unified Communications (UC) elements included and specific Unified Communications (only) implementations. The three year TCO per-user pricing for the average of those cases is shown below. Note this is not per-user-per-year, as in the analysis above; however, the data in this section is consistent with the BCR article above, when like elements are compared; e.g. the BCR article did not include maintenance costs nor operations costs, which are included in the TCO illustrations below.
Complete VoIP and UC:
UC Only:
3. Vendor Pricing for UC from VoiceCon Orlando 2009 Tutorial, "UC Options: Who's Offering What?" The link is to the complete presentation, which can be downloaded, and to the accompanying voice track, which can be listened to as an mp3. In that presentation each of ten suppliers offered information on their price points for elements of UC solutions:
The summary table is shown below, though it is recommended you review the presenation to understandd the details of this summary table. The values shown are also per-user-per-year, amortized over a three-year life cycle. As you see, the costs for UC functionality are quite reasonable, and consistent with the forecast above.
Of course, questions are welcome directly to mparker@UCStrategies.com or to the UCStrategies.com Ask an Expert service.
UC Resources Section To add content or links to UC Resources contact:Organized and Managed by mparker@UCStrategies.com Text (c) 2010 M. F. Parker. Content (c) as indicated.