UM seems to be the latest buzz word in the messaging industry. Companies are looking at UM to try to fix many of their business challenges. Every company needs to grow revenue, remain competitive, acquire and retain customers, control costs, improve business processes, and maintain competitive advantage.

However, to implement UM, it takes tremendous amount of resources that businesses do not have.  They are limited in personnel, expertise, budget, and solution knowledge.  

Why are companies looking to move to UM?

Businesses believe that going to UM will reduce their operational costs.  It will reduce long distance charges, maintenance costs associated with updates and additions, and infrastructure due to having common platforms.   

It also will improve worker productivity because mobility, voicemail, email, etc will all be tied together.  Workers in any remote office or working remotely can use the IP softphones, make administrative changes remotely, and update or move equipment easily.   Real life customer studies show that most customers see a return on investment (ROI) within 3 months or less!

What is the downside of UM?

Customers have a hard time seeing the benefits of UM because the end user training is costly and hard to measure.  Linking the new technology to business processes is a tough task.  IP communication is still an unknown.  55% of financial services firms indicate uncertainty in voice quality as their number one issue to moving to UM.

Cost savings tend to be the largest driver for deployment.   However, UM products have high upfront costs.  In addition, companies are having a difficult time quantifying any of the productivity benefits.  They are concerned with hidden costs and how their technical team will deploy, architect and find the right solution.  Deploying UM weakens network security, gives them a single point of failure and uncertain voice quality.

Who and how will companies deploy UM?

Many companies are looking to utilize their partners or managed services to implement UM.   28% cited provisioning, installing, and testing as their main time saver for using managed services.  Also, only 27% of the companies feel that they have the ability to implement an IP telephony system.  Companies look to managed services to offload their infrastructure applications like messaging, VOIP, and conferencing.  The main justification is the reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO).

Surveying the customers show that outsourcing or in house sourcing the project is mainly about the perception of the respondents.   When asked about why companies would outsource or in-source the project, respondents rated lower operational costs as their number one reason for outsourcing or managing it in-house.

Here are the top 5 reasons.

Why manage it in-house?

1) lower operational costs

2) we have the skills

3) better security

4) corporate policy

5) better job in house

Why use managed services?

1) lower operational costs

2) lower capital costs

3) reduce the risk of obsolescence

4) they can provide better uptime

5) lack of staff to manage the systems

If United Messaging is of interest to you and your customers, 90% of the customers believe that they will use consulting services to implement it.  Tremendous business opportunity exists for the partners who already know and consult with messaging products.

Hyun Kim, Bynari Inc.