Communication at the heart of business productivity

By Knut Aasrud, General Manager, Communications Sector, Microsoft  EMEA 

At the recent Gartner IT Expo, I asked the audience in my Unified Communications speech the fundamental question that many of us will have pondered over when discussing unified communications deployment: Are we adjusting our workplace to accommodate to a new generation whose communication and collaboration habits are different from most of us?

Developing unified communication solutions has been a bumpy ride over the last decade or so, which can be summed up by saying the customer has had a less-than-satisfactory-experience, largely due to the complexity, lack of integration and spiraling costs of unified communications to date. But how much better would it be if we could bring all the elements of unified communications – email, IM, video conferencing, voice mail etc – together into a seamless experience and how much better would it be if customers had the choice between running their own infrastructure or buying it as a service in the cloud?

In order to drive innovation from the front, we have to be in touch with what our business customers are feeling when it comes to the uptake of unified communications, along with their key pains. As with many business issues, we can broadly categorise the pains into two buckets: IT pains and business pains.

•On the IT side: cost reduction; maintain compliance; satisfy broad set of users across generations; and leverage existing investments are the criteria most of our customers are working towards when thinking about IT investments

•On the Business side:  information overload; global business transactions; productivity gains; and satisfying users to retain talent are some of the drivers for the need to simplify communications 

Forrester recently researched the business impact that unified communications can have on operations and found that as well as decreasing costs (reduction in travel expenses, lower messaging costs, telephony and audio conferencing charges), unified communications improves business outcomes (end-user and team productivity, resolve customer issues faster and attract/ retain employees). 

Our software-based strategy and implementation of unified communications is to ensure that it is accessible through any device, at any location (on-the-go, in the office, at home) and gives the customer the choice of on-premise or in the cloud services.

With Microsoft Communications Server ‘14’, we’re investing to make communications simpler, lower cost and more open. The new version will deliver a complete communications solution, including enterprise telephony and a familiar and powerful way to communicate and collaborate using Microsoft Office, SharePoint and Exchange.

We’ve built up an impressive momentum with our unified communications solutions to date, including 1 million voice seats, 400% growth in emerging markets, 6.4 billion hosted conferencing minutes and an eco-system that currently includes more than 200 partners developing solutions based on our Communications Server 14 platform.  

We understand that in an uncertain world, one thing remains certain: no matter what the workplace or workforce, communications will always be at the heart of the business and is an essential tool to increasing productivity across the organisation.