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How to Stay Sane in the “In-Between” Stage of Your Unified Communications Drive

TS_Guest| August 2, 2011
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By Ed Wilmes

 

I’d like to discuss pain points — and how HP Unified Communications Services can begin to address real concerns about your transformation to unified voice communications.

 

HP believes that our unified communications approach delivers results and is the right way forward for your ultimate business success. We know that UC streamlines IT and significantly reduces costs in a number of areas, including:

  • Telephony
  • Travel
  • Training
  • Real-estate and facilities management.

 

And we know that there are significantly improved outcomes when you incorporate this approach into your overall business strategy, (especially within your business processes). We see improved user and team productivity, enhanced collaboration, faster project completion and time savings for employees and managers. (Read how one company did it here (PDF, 265 KB) Unified communication, built on the solid foundation of voice transformation, is key to the anywhere, any time, any way responsiveness of the Instant-On Enterprise.

 

Having a clear path and implementation plan through HP’s strategy-and-roadmap approach enables short-term success while delivering on the longer-term strategy of your UC journey. 

There are times when I’m out working with a customer and we’re talking in the abstract about where they are now and where they need to be. It’s all good in theory. Then I see a panicked look on their face when we start to talk about the “in-between” time, which can be very short — a month or a few months — but may also be (depending on the size of the company) a two- to three-year transitional period when the budget or business requirements dictate a path of longer duration between legacy and transformed architectures.

 

Recently, a customer stood in front of me and said “Listen. This part is real for me. It’s my job that’s on the line if this implementation doesn’t go as planned.”  My response? “We can and will make it work for you because we do this all the time — not once, not twice, but all the time — and we have refined best practices as a result, based on the collective global experience that we will bring to your solution.” 

 

And this is how we do it …

 

Our best practices for voice transformation include real-time modeling in our proprietary HP UC Integration Center. Here, staging of integrated solutions minimizes errors and risks, reduces costs and maximizes success. Then, from the UCIC, we build the pieces in a test environment prior to rollout, validating the approach in the customer environment and prior to piloting the first sites.

 

Next, the transformation architecture (the architecture that delivers during the in-between state) as well as the end-state architecture are put through the paces of a real transformation. By doing this, we can identify any “gotchas” to reduce real-time risks and increase business continuity success and therefore confidence in the transformation approach. 

 

In the UC Integration Center, we can also take multi-vendor elements in a prescribed solution and validate how they work together. For instance, when a software vendor says that their product supports office extensibility, we can replicate and test that feature and get an objective view of what that really means. Then, we can confidently say which features are supported by the applications and which features are not supported, and to what extent exactly.

 

Using the automated staging in our HP Staging Center along with the results in our HP UCIC minimizes errors, reduces dead-on-arrival equipment and significantly reduces labor requirements. These UC Integration best practices make significant portions of the deployments practically turnkey, with minimal configuration required at a customer site.

 

We believe that unified communications promises tremendous benefits, but only when the components of each customer’s unique solution are integrated properly and are integrated into the business's processes. Our deep experience from multiple installations, applied in varied integration lab scenarios, can work for you, too.

 

Find out more at our Unified Communications solution page.


Tags: Staging Center| UCIC| Unified Communciations Integration Center| Unified communications| voice transformation View All (5)
Labels: Technology Services| Unified Communications Services
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