Enterprise Communications Featured Article

At this point, we’ve all been there. When interacting with colleagues, we juggle Skype (News - Alert), Go-To Meeting, our hosted phone and conference system, a chat program or two, built-in communications services such as Google Talk, and others.

Until last March, this familiar situation was what faced employees at Intelligent Energy, a clean energy business. That’s when the company decided there needed to be a better way than the hodgepodge of systems its staff routinely used to communicate.

“The challenge we had was the consumerization of IT, and if employees had a smart device they can download umpteen kinds of apps, that’s the freedom users have today,” Stuart Gale said in blog recently, head of infrastructure at Intelligent Energy. “The challenge was trying to standardize in a world that was effectively consumerized.”

It looked to Polycom (News - Alert) for a solution, a world leader in unified communications and a technology partner for enterprise communications provider Tadiran Telecom.

Intelligent Energy used Polycom’s RealPresence Platform, which is integrated with Microsoft (News - Alert) Lync and offers unified communications.

The platform by Polycom removed the need for a costly videoconferencing solution, and moved the company away from e-mail and toward shorter messaging.

“We have also seen a reduction in mobile phone bills due to the call back functionality, while the removal of hosted platforms gave a little more flexibility in the phone system,” Gayle noted, and there has been a 10 percent rise in videoconferencing use since the Polycom solution unified the various communication channels within the company and brought some order to what had been a chaotic process.

These sort of benefits are what many businesses see when they make the move to unified communications. It isn’t that the technology brings startlingly new functionality so much as it makes existing channels easier. Just as Macintosh fans have long said that the Mac OS is just easier, unified communications performs a similar act of subtly. By bringing it all under one roof, communications quietly becomes a lot easier.

For Intelligent Energy, the Polycom system paid for itself in less than a year due to added productivity and a reduction in more costly services.

Chalk up another convert for unified communications. Like Working on a Mac, the benefits of unified communications can be subtle but pronounced.