AMS.NET Blog

VDI Enables Workforce Flexibility- Work Anywhere, Anytime

Work is no longer a physical place you go to every day. Work is something you do whether you are at the office, on the road, at the local coffee shop or at home. Just as the place of work lines are blurred so is the line between work and personal time. Employees are working after hours, on the weekend in between family activities and even on vacation. VDI and the virtualization of Unified Communications support workforce flexibility and allow employees to work anywhere, anytime.

Virtualization began with servers and with further advancements in hypervisor technology; organizations now can virtualize desktops and mission critical applications such as Unified Communications (UC). Since UC delivers real time communications with call control and instant messaging, careful consideration should be made to the platform that supports this virtualized application so that it provides high availability and quality of service. A virtualized infrastructure should support virtualization features such as vMotion and Storage vMotion for high availability, optimization of resources and consistent security.   

VDI coupled with virtualized Unified Communication applications enable employees to access company resources from virtually anywhere, from any device at any time. From a company laptop, employee owned device or a thin client, employees can access their desktop. Along with user and organization benefits, a virtualized UC solution minimizes the traditional desktop maintenance. The desktop image is pushed from the virtualized data center. If there is a breach of security or malware attack, the session can be terminated and another desktop pushed to the user. Integrated Unified Communication phones and virtual desktop thin clients provide a smaller footprint on the user’s desk and further reduce IT maintenance and support.

Delivering UC services with VDI on a virtualized architecture enables the flexibility required of today’s workforce. Successfully delivering these applications requires planning, consideration of the virtualized data center and the virtualized desktop infrastructure. To learn more, please join us at one of our VDI Technical Seminars coming to a location near you.

I have a phone that works just fine... why Unified Communications?

For more than a decade, manufacturers such as Cisco Systems and value added resellers have been encouraging customers to move away from a traditional land line to a VoIP solution and in the last few years to a Unified Communications solution all with the promise of increased productivity and reduced costs. It wasn’t just lip service! Chadwick Martin Bailey on behalf of Cisco conducted research that identified six proven Unified Communications Application Benefits. You’ll be amazed at the findings.

Six Unified Communications Application Benefits:

1. Presense, IM, Clients
   Unified Communications solutions integrate VoIP capabilities with presence indicators that show user availability and the best way to be contacted to facilitate faster decision making. Instant Messaging provides quick real-time communications that can be easily escalated to group chats or web conferences if necessary. Research shows that 49% of user organizations saved up to 20 minutes per employee daily by reaching workers on the first try. 54% of user organizations saved up to 20 minutes per employee daily by escalating IM chats into phone calls. 50% of user organizations saved up to 20 minutes per employee daily by escalating IM chats into Web conferences.
   
   
2. Telepresence
   A telepresence solution provides an in-person experience with reduced travel costs and increased frequency of face-to-face meetings with customers, employees or prospects. Chadwick Martin Bailey found that 46% of user organizations realized travel savings of more than 5 days per employee annually. 68% of user organizations reported productivity improvements between geographically-dispersed functional groups.
   
   
3. Unified Messaging
   Unified messaging speeds up user productivity by enabling users to check voicemail messages from their inbox, via their desktop, or from their mobile device. Speech-activated tools allow workers to organize messages and quickly respond to messages. 50% of user organizations saved up to 20 minutes per employee daily from more efficient message management.
   
   
4. Conferencing & Collaboration
   Conferencing and collaboration tools such as Cisco’s WebEx provide a virtual meeting space to conduct client meetings, team brainstorming sessions, demonstrations, and more. Collaborating and sharing content and video at the same time enables a highly engaging meeting or event. Over 75% of user organizations experience improved productivity of employees across geographically-dispersed locations due to voice and video conferencing. 64% of user organizations experienced reduced travel costs of over 10%.
   
   
5. Mobile Communications
   The workforce is becoming increasingly mobile with telecommuters, sales people who are in the field and executives with demanding travel schedules. Mobility allows these remote workers reliable and secure access to company resources wherever they are located. Features such as single number reach streamline communications by giving callers one number to dial and by redirecting incoming calls to multiple phones. Research showed that 33% of user organizations saved 11 to 20 minutes per employee daily from corporate director access, click-to-dial, presence and visual voicemail on mobile devices. 67% of user organizations reported increased mobile worker productivity and faster problem resolution. 40% of user organizations indicated 11 to 30 minutes saved per employee daily with single business phone number voicemail regardless of device.
   
   
6. Contact Centers
   Contact centers when integrated with your phone system and business process can be powerful tools for call routing, contact management, email management, call recording and quality control. 41% of user organizations reported contact center upgrades lead to a 6 to 10% increase in first call resolution. 33% of user organizations reported contact center upgrades decreased average call response times by 11 to 25%.

A Unified Communications solution has the power to transform communication and improve business with improved productivity therefore reduced costs. By removing location barriers, reducing phone tag to reach subject matter experts and by increasing the number and quality of communication tools, businesses have so much more than a telephone. They have a communication solution to power their business.

 

Why move from Telephony to Unified Communications?

As we dive into the year 2012, is increasing performance and productivity top of mind? If the answer is yes, you are not alone. Each year, businesses of all types and sizes strive to increase productivity in order to gain a competitive edge. A unified communications system does more than just provide call connectivity; it can be a valuable tool to enable employees to increase productivity. Unified communications provides features to speed up decisions, reduce response times and improve cross-department communication all resulting in increased productivity.

According to Aberdeen Research, businesses achieve the greatest value from a unified communication solution through mobility, presence, web conferencing among other integrated communication features.

Mobility
Mobility refers to providing a single business voice mailbox and a single-number-reach application that intelligently manages, filters, routes and connects calls between a worker’s IP desk phone and mobile cellular or home phone. Users can transition active calls between their IP phone and mobile phone without interruption. Employees can originate enterprise calls from a mobile or other remote phone as if they were calling from their desk IP phone. With mobility, remote workers have the same directories and call resources as headquarter-based employees and users can provide more responsive service with no additional effort.

• Give callers one number to dial
• Remain mobile by moving active calls between desk and mobile phone
• Direct unanswered calls to a single voicemail box

Presence
Presence allows employees to easily communicate regardless of their physical location. Presence indicators show the availability of colleagues based on the desktop, mobile, telephony and calendar information to reduce communication delays. They also indicate the most appropriate communication method such as phone or instant messaging. Presence can also facilitate instant messaging between Cisco Unified Communications and other applications.

• Speed up decisions by viewing availability information prior to making a call
• Increase first-call resolution by quickly reaching appropriate resource
• Improve customer satisfaction with proper call routing

Web Conferencing
Web Conferencing allows employees to simultaneously speak to each other and customers while sharing content. Web conferencing is available on-premise, off-premise or a hybrid solution that takes advantage of on-premise audio conferencing with off-premise web conferencing. These tools allow remote or distributed employees to easily communicate face-to-face without travel costs. Employees can also increase customer face-time with web conferencing tools.

• Improve meeting effectiveness with audio and content sharing
• Increase customer face-to-face time without travel costs
• Support sales meetings, marketing events or corporate announcements

Businesses large or small benefit from an integrated Unified Communications solution. Small to mid-size businesses need to scale and work more efficiently to stay competitive. With mobility features and conferencing, employees can frequently stay in contact with employees and customers wherever they are located. Large businesses with a distributed workforce can improve communications and speed up decisions with mobility and presence information. Upgrading to a unified communications solution can give your business the tools to increase productivity and gain a competitive edge.

Top 5 VoIP Implementation Triggers

Technology runs business and some may argue runs the world! Organizations large or small invest in computers, data networks, applications and other technology to run their business. A communication system is also a critical component of business operations. Just as you refresh computers and servers or upgrade applications, you should assess and upgrade your voice and phone system to support scalability and worker productivity.

Companies upgrade their phone system to a VoIP or Unified Communications solution for a variety of reasons including mobility features to support remote and mobile workers, presence and single number reach to improve productivity, call center, web conferencing and more. In addition to communication and productivity reasons, there are 5 main triggers that prompt organizations to move to a VoIP phone system.

1. Upgrading Your Data Network
   VoIP (Voice-over-Internet Protocol) is the transmission of voice traffic over the data network. If an organization is upgrading their data network with new routers, switches or upgrading their ISP connection, they may want to consider moving to a VoIP phone system. By coordinating these projects, you can ensure that your network equipment has the proper QoS and your pipe is sufficient to handle both data and voice traffic.
2. Moving Locations
   During a move, network cabling has to be coordinated, ISP service need to be ordered among other technology considerations. Coordinating these services and making these decisions once makes your VoIP implementation easier.
3. Merger or Acquisition
   Often one of the biggest challenges in a merger or acquisition is merging the two companies resources including employees, locations and technology. Consideration of a VoIP system makes sense at a time when you are replacing equipment and making technology investments.
4. Obsolete Equipment
   One of the most common triggers to moving to a VoIP system is existing equipment reaching end-of-life, end-of-support and becoming obsolete. Keeping outdated equipment that is no longer supported by the manufacturer becomes a costly prospect.
5. Business Communication Problems
   If an organization is experiencing call overload, an increase in contact center wait times, missed calls or employees are playing phone tag, a VoIP communication system might be warranted. In addition to solving business communication programs, a new system improves communication, streamlines processes and increases productivity.

If you haven’t already upgraded your traditional phone system to a VoIP system, it’s likely one of these trigger events will cause you to make the move in the near future. As you look for tools to get a competitive edge, existing equipment becomes obsolete or you experience one of the other VoIP implementation triggers, you’ll find that upgrading to a VoIP phone solution will allow you to run your business more efficiently.

 

Should You Replace Your Legacy TDM Phone System?

As technology solution providers, we often consult with our customers and prospects about their current technology landscape and business challenges. A question that often comes up is if they should replace their legacy TDM phone system. We hear, “We have a dial tone and it works so why replace it?” or customers say, “Isn’t a VoIP system complex and costly?” Let me clear up these questions and misperceptions.

While the basic functionality of a phone system is dial tone to make phone calls, today’s VoIP and Unified Communications solutions provide so much more. VoIP systems not only provide call connectivity, they deliver communication and productivity features that eliminate communication bottle necks and allow small and mid-size businesses to gain a competitive edge.

Features such as Single Number Reach allow you to publish one phone number that will reach you wherever you are located and on whatever device. Executives that travel or sales individuals that are often on the road can be easily reached. Presence indicators allow colleagues to see who is available to take a customer call or to quickly answer a question. These VoIP and Unified Communication features allow businesses to streamline communications, speed up decisions and improve productivity.

Several years ago, VoIP solutions were being adopted by primarily enterprise and public sector entities and since then the perception in the market place is that these solutions are too complex and costly for mid-size businesses’. Recently, Cisco Systems has developed a line of Business Edition solutions which are purpose-built, single box appliances specifically for this market. Small and mid-size organizations now have access to superior call performance and productivity tools of large enterprise companies.

These integrated server and voice gateway appliances provide voice, mobility, messaging and voice gateway services on a single appliance for reduced costs and ease-of-use.

Business Edition VoIP solutions deliver:

• Voicemail
• Conferencing
• Auto Attendant
• Call Control Features- Park, Hold Calls, etc.
• Single Number Reach
• Extension Mobility
• Presence
• Video Collaboration
• SIP Trunking Capabilities
• Simple Web-based Administration
• All-in-One Appliance
• Portfolio of Phones Available
• Soft Phone Support
• Cisco WebEx  Web Conferencing Support
• Future Upgradability

If complexity and affordability were holding you back, now you can upgrade to a VoIP solution and obtain tools for better communication and increased productivity. AMS.NET can deliver solutions built for the mid-market that are affordable and provide enterprise-class functionality and the foundation of Unified Communications.

Where Virtualization Meets Unified Communications

The journey to the private cloud begins with virtualizing servers in the data center and building a virtualized infrastructure. Further down the path to the private cloud, organizations begin to layer on applications including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), voice and unified communications. With Cisco’s release of the VXI architecture and endpoints, virtualization has met unified communications.

Cisco’s Virtualization Experience Clients allow organizations to realize the benefits of virtual desktops without compromising a high-quality collaborative user experience. Several Zero clients are available some of which attach to the back of Cisco’s Unified IP Phones (8961, 9951, 9971) and others are stand alone versions. All models support a Citrix and VMware View desktop backend environment. Cisco’s Cius tablet offers a mobile desktop device that can also act as an audio client when integrated with Cisco’s Personal Communicator.

Click here to watch video

Watch this short video of Cisco demonstrating the Virtual Experience Client Endpoints along with the Cius tablet as an audio client and endpoint for a Citrix desktop.

Imagine being able to truly provide a rich collaborative experience and access to any application on any device anywhere in a virtualized environment.

 

Unified Communications – The Platform for Change

The new normal for businesses today—from SMB to enterprise concerns—includes information overwhelm, national or even global value chains and escalating market competition. The traditional ways of doing things are no longer capable of producing the results our companies need to maintain competitive advantage. In a world driven by knowledge and interactions, it’s time to consider the advantages of unified communications as a platform to embrace change.

Does your company need to:

• Connect employees, customers, suppliers and partners with a wide variety of information and each other—accessible in real time?


• Provide access to critical business information to an increasingly mobile workforce?


• Improve workforce productivity just to keep up with day-to-day tasks?


• Identify and quickly locate experts for customer issue resolution or project completion?


• Communicate effectively and efficiently between different office locations?


• Reduce travel for key executives to reduce downtime?

Collaboration is most effective when enabled by a multi-layered approach that provides the right tools for sharing information and communicating more efficiently. Depending upon how you define your organization’s need for collaboration, you may not have considered unified communications as the right option for you. But, in reality, it could be just exactly what you need.

Unified communications can be implemented iteratively so that you harness what you need as you need it. Consider for example if your definition of collaboration is restricted to information access. Using a file server approach may have worked fine in the past, but it likely doesn’t do so well as your workforce becomes more mobile and needs to access that information from a variety of means, such as a web interface, a client application or a mobile device. Unified communications can answer that need with less overhead than trying to modify your file server approach.

Or, perhaps your company considers collaborative tools as the answer for managing your employee’s time. If this were the case, you may have focused on a calendaring system that includes contacts and task management. But, just accommodating scheduling will not improve employee efficiency to the point that you’ve maximized benefits to the business.

Consider instead that presence enables your company to locate the best available expert at the exact time they can provide value. Instant messaging can reduce the time spent on meetings when a simple question and answer session can speed time to task completion. And, video conferencing can elevate the quality of meeting productiveness.

However you’ve approached collaboration in the past may be leaving healthy benefits on the table that can transform what you thought of as the best approach. You can add the services and tools as your needs evolve without reinventing the wheel each time some new capability becomes a requirement rather than a nice to have.

Those are only a few examples of how unified communications can serve as a platform for change. Don’t you think that perhaps it’s time for you to reconsider how you’re defining collaboration to make sure that you’re getting the optimal results for your company?

How Video Conferencing Impacts Your Sales Process

Whether you’re a small, mid-size or enterprise business, video conferencing can transform the way your sales team gets the job done. Sure, it reduces travel costs without removing “face-to-face” interactions with your customers, but there are also other benefits such as active training on new product releases and shortening sales cycles.

But, don’t take our word for it. Take a look at how companies are incorporating Cisco’s WebEx video to improve their sales processes.

Imagine being able to pull your salespeople off the streets for a couple of hours, train them on new products or services and have them out on the street selling the new offering that afternoon.

What impact would shaving 25% off the length of your sales cycle have on your company’s growth objectives?

In addition to impacting your sales process, the flexibility of a video conferencing solution can accommodate situations that range from 1-on-1 collaborative work sessions that put remote workers “in the same room” to facilitating your annual sales meeting and user forums. 

Whichever way you slice it, the benefits of video conferencing are definitely worth considering. That you can have WebEx up and running across your organization within several weeks makes the opportunity even more compelling – and the ROI faster.

SMBs Reap Collaboration Benefits through Consolidation

It’s more than likely that your workforce has clamored for applications that enable them to more readily connect with colleagues, customers and partners. Even for small and mid-size companies with less than 1,000 employees, this can mean you’ve implemented a variety of tools in an ad hoc fashion just to keep business moving. If this is your situation, you may find the time and cost your staff is expending to maintain these siloed solutions is too high. You will also discover that an isolated array of distinct tools isn’t delivering the optimal impact to business performance that a unified system could.

Deploying a unified communications (UC) system provides SMBs access to a selection of performance-related tools that work together to allow them to compete on a larger scale without inflating costs. With intuitive collaboration capabilities only a click away, small and mid-size organizations can effectively level the playing field and create competitive advantages.

The most obvious advantage of deploying UC is meeting end user demands for advanced communications capabilities with a standardized system implementation that reduces demand on support and maintenance resources. Your total cost of ownership will be lower, not just due to the reduction of time and maintenance, but to the VMware virtualization technologies that consolidate multiple, integrated applications onto a single server with the Cisco Unified Communications Manager Business Edition 6000.

All of this said, the true value to your organization comes with the advanced collaboration capabilities that UC system provides.

A full suite of UC capabilities is available, including an impromptu conferencing application, presence status, instant messaging, click to dial, speech recognition voicemail and advanced mobility (such as single number reach). You remain in control with the flexibility to decide the array of the tools your business deploys and when you do so. UC is a lot more than a VoIP telephony solution.

Smaller companies are often challenged by limitations in staff availability that increase delays to decisions while workers wait for access to expertise. This can also impact their ability to serve customers as well as the ability to scale the business on demand to take advantage of a swiftly changing market conditions.

By shifting the way in which you deploy communications, the ability to create richer, on-demand experiences that improve business outcomes becomes a standard, not an exception.

Consider the following opportunities that consolidating your communication tools into a unified system can present to increase your business velocity:

• Presence allows people to discover who potentially has the information they need and indicate the best way to connect with them. This eliminates the phone and email tag that stops productivity in its tracks. If one person is not available, an alternative choice can be made to keep your workflows in motion.
  
  
• Escalation with a click introduces best practices for streamlining information exchanges. As an example, the ability to get brief answers to questions is facilitated by instant messaging but should a longer discussion be requires, the session can be converted to a phone call with a click.
  
  
• Face-to-Face is still the gold standard for the most effective communications. The difference in today’s business environment is that this experience is no longer defined by who’s physically in the room with you. Video conferencing makes face-to-face conversations the new normal to keep your business momentum up to speed regardless of where your workforce, partners, suppliers or customers may be. 

Consolidation is doing more with less. Collaboration is doing more with more. A unified communications system could be your answer to both of those needs. Integrated communications tools enable small and mid-sized companies to work intuitively and move at the speed of business, reaping productivity, performance and financial benefits along the way.

Want Success in Unified Communications?Concentrate on Successful User Adoption

To take Unified Communications (UC) to the next level in terms of success, organizations are challenged to focus on user adoption. While the business case for UC often is extremely compelling in terms of overall savings and productivity benefits, none of these gains can be realized unless UC is embraced by an organization's workforce.

The first challenge to adoption lies in how a UC solution is presented in the first place. "All too often when Solutions Integrators are proposing a communication solution – whether it is basic VoIP or a UC solution for collaboration, instant messaging, unified messaging or even communication enabling business processes – they get so involved in the technical aspects of the solution that they overlook one of the most basic components of business communication," writes Pam Avila at Unified Communications Strategies, a portal devoted to UC trends and opportunities.

"That component is the 'equipment' that sits on the end-user’s desk or travels in their pocket or briefcase. We refer to this equipment as the 'end points,' which sounds very official and technical," she adds. "In reality, however, it’s all about the end-user experience. Provide a great end-user experience and acceptance of technology is almost assured. Conversely, move the end-user too far out of their comfort zone and a disaster looms."

Mike Sapien, a principal analyst for Ovum, contends that UC services should be introduced in the enterprise the same way as new PCs have been introduced. As he explains, users gain upfront training. They are educated on new applications, features and the value of these capabilities.

"Just like with new PCs, UC users may at first be completely unfamiliar with some new features and have only very narrow experience with others," he contends. "The assumption that end users can immediately jump in, knowing which tools to use to improve their productivity, is a bad one."

He explains that some of the most successful UC implementation results are produced when companies create formal and informal teams to focus on training users, encouraging adoption, and identifying valuable uses of UC capabilities. In most of these cases, top management also embraces the technology and leads by example.  The rest of the enterprise, in other words, is watching what they do.

"Consider earlier communication technologies, such as voice mail and e-mail, and how often senior managers relied on administrators to manage these tools for them. Some managers went so far as to ask assistants to type up their voice mail." he adds. "This sort of avoidance technique won’t work with UC features such as instant messaging and telepresence. It has to be clear to employees that they’re expected to use UC features, and bypassing these tools will leave them behind professionally. Senior management has to model regular and effective use of the UC features so that others will respond similarly."

When senior managers embrace Unified Communications, they set the stage for widespread adoption across the enterprise. They accelerate time to value by taking steps that encourage others.