Integrated UC Provides Great New Potential for Business Productivity

Unified communications has long been touted as a way to increase workplace productivity, improve the quality of life for employees, and in the process deliver better returns for businesses.

In fact, conferencing services alone can enable more personal communications and result in travel cost savings. That may help explain why leading analysts predict strong growth for audio and Web conferencing services over the next few years, especially in emerging markets, ranging from more than 25 percent in Central and Eastern Europe to more than 40 percent in Latin America.

But, to date, massive acceptance of unified communications solutions that bring together all the key applications and functionality that workers typically require – like conferencing, CRM, mobility, and more – has been limited at best. The term unified communications has become tainted in the past decade as the industry has grappled to address a rapidly changing communications environment and appeal to businesses with integrated solutions that are at the same time fun and productive to use.

However, today, new and integrated solutions are making unified communications more appealing to a wider array of businesses and are expected to see more widespread adoption.

One key problem that UC can help address is the ability to locate and connect with people to move workflow forward. Studies indicate that 16 percent of work projects are delayed due to impeded access to decision makers.

Session initiation protocol has been a catalyst to allow for flexibility, productivity, scale and simplicity around UC, according to TMCnet sources. SIP was initially embraced by organizations as a way to significantly reduce their connectivity costs, but SIP-based UC infrastructure has been shown to improve productivity more than 23 percent.

Today’s workspace requires a unified platform that integrates well with existing systems to enhance productivity, mobility and response time. The need for a solution that enables access to all communications and collaboration applications through a single, easy-to-use interface has never been greater.

To learn more about how to implement such a solution so your business can take advantage of its many benefits, join Arkadin, Microsoft (News - Alert) and Technology Marketing Corp. for the Dec. 6 2pm Eastern webinar titled “How to Integrate Lync-based UC into Your Business”. Speakers include Brad Lundberg, solutions sales manager of unified communications at Microsoft Partner Hosting & Cloud Services; and Dave Dolin, senior product marketing manager, and Zach Katsof, North America business manager-Web & UC, at Arkadin (News - Alert).