Managing Mobile Mania

In the space of just a few years, Art Johnston has gone from thinking of unified communications as optional to viewing it as “a strategy that we need to implement to be competitive.”

As CIO at Argo Turboserve Corp. (ATC), a Lyndhurst, N.J.-based company that provides customized supply chain management and nuclear engineering services, Johnston understands the importance of ensuring that a company’s employees are able to access all their communications tools at any time, from any place.

“Our value-add to customers is in getting them immediate responses, solutions and answers,” he explains. “The one thing we don’t want to have is ‘We’ll get back to you’ as an answer.”

Establishing integrated, always-there communications is a tall order, considering that about half of ATC’s 200 employees conduct most of their business on smartphones and tablets.

That’s where unified communications comes into play.

UC brings together all of the disparate pieces of hardware and software tools that people use to stay connected — from old-fashioned telephones to mobile video chat — and makes those channels available anytime, anywhere, from any device.

“The idea is that all of that — all that different kind of communications — exists in a single interface,” explains Melanie Turek, an analyst at IT research firm Frost & Sullivan.

In a perfect UC environment, an employee could receive a call on his mobile phone from someone who dialed his office line; or he could join a webconference from his laptop, access voicemail from a desktop at a satellite office and use an online “presence” application to see if a colleague is available to answer a question. And he could do all of that using a single, easy-to-navigate set of tools accessible on any and all devices.

That’s the ideal Johnston is after as he makes his final choice of platform, which should be in place by midyear for most of ATC’s salesforce and engineering team.

That day can’t come fast enough, as far as Johnston is concerned. Unified communications “is not just a ‘nice to have.’ This is very important for our company to have as we go out and work with our customers and partners,” he says.

UC Heats Up

Unified communications has been around for years, but interest among IT leaders has historically been more theoretical than practical, and infrastructure and cost obstacles have held back widescale implementation at many organizations.

That’s changing, says Turek. Trends such as the explosion of mobile technology, the consumerization of IT and an increasingly competitive business environment are causing many IT execs to change UC’s status from “optional” to “urgent.”

Indeed, research firm Gartner reports that worldwide enterprise spending on UC components has gone from nearly $16.5 billion in 2008 to $17.8 billion in 2010 and should reach $18.7 billion in 2013.

And in a March 2011 survey by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), 49% of the 600 IT and business leaders polled said their spending for UC technology would grow faster than their overall IT budgets in the coming 12 months. Large organizations — those with 500 or more employees — were the most likely to increase their unified communications investments relative to their overall IT spending, according to the survey results, which were released in June 2011.

That said, Tim Herbert, vice president of research at CompTIA, says companies are likely to find that moving forward with unified communications is a complex and costly undertaking.

According to CompTIA, organizations could pay $1,000 or more per user per month for a high-end, all-inclusive system that they host and maintain. At the other end of the spectrum, companies that choose not to set up in-house systems and instead contract with a service provider for a hosted voice-over-IP system with a basic selection of UC options could pay $25 or less per user per month.

Many companies, spurred on by gadget-happy employees, load up on new mobile technologies but soon discover that their underlying communications infrastructure, which consists of older hardware and software, isn’t up to the task — and then face the fact that they need extensive infrastructure upgrades to support UC.

Also complicating any move toward full UC is the fact that many companies built their communications systems with a mix of hardware and software components from various vendors, and not all of their systems will work together in a unified manner, says Turek.

Leading UC vendors that sell complete suites include Avaya, Cisco Systems, Microsoft and Siemens, while vendors selling components that organizations can layer into UC include Citrix Online, Polycom and LifeSize Communications, along with Cisco companies WebEx and Tandberg.

“And now we’re starting to see the encroachment of social media — Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn — and Skype,” Turek says.

What’s more, IT leaders have to make all of that work not on a uniform collection of desktops but rather on the range of devices that employees use — often a mix of desktop PCs, laptops, smartphones and tablets. In short, UC “is not plug-and-play,” says Turek. “It’s very complex and has lots of moving parts.”

Meeting the Demand

Given the complexity of both the problem and the solution, many organizations would prefer to move ahead slowly. But as more and more employees use mobile devices to get work done, they’re looking for UC capabilities like call forwarding and voice-to-IM connectivity — and they’re looking for them now.

“You have more and more people who are on the soccer field on afternoons working, or working on the weekends and in the evenings,” Turek says. What’s more, “they’re bringing their own devices, and they’re using social media tools, using Skype or free audioconferencing services or presence technology if the company doesn’t provide it.”

That’s the kind of scenario that can force a company’s hand: It either makes an investment in UC or resolves to live with the consequences of workers piecing together their own communications solutions, along with the questionable security and patchwork reliability that often comes with such do-it-yourself fixes.

Even so, it often takes some sort of trigger event — such as a merger, a relocation or a major phone system upgrade — to spur companies toward looking into unified communications, says James Whitemore, executive vice president of sales and marketing at UC vendor West IP Communications, in Louisville, Ky.

The Reinvestment Fund, an investment group based in Philadelphia, is one case in point.

CIO Barry Porozni says the company moved in May 2011 and is in the process of upgrading from an obsolete system to Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express, a call-processing system that combines voice, video and data. All 80 employees have land lines with a corporate number, about half of them also have company-issued smartphones, and still more bring in their own smartphones.

Porozni says different groups of workers want different UC functionality. For example, some want to use their smartphones (either personal or corporate-issued) to seamlessly access their corporate email and voicemail, while others want call forwarding between their smartphones and office phones.

The new Cisco system will support these capabilities, allowing Porozni to satisfy the various needs among the different groups.

Even so, Porozni anticipates he’ll need to add additional features down the road as workers become comfortable with the various capabilities and as new features evolve. Whether it’s a single number for all devices or some yet-to-be-invented feature, “there will be demand for more in the future,” he predicts.

Turek says that sums up where many companies are right now: “Very few companies are doing the whole thing at once because they don’t have that luxury, so they’re asking, ‘Where do we start?’ And what comes first is generally based on the needs of the organization.”

Rolling Out UC

At ATC, needs took a back seat to more practical concerns, at least for a while. Company leaders realized more than a year ago that they’d have to move toward UC but held off, aligning the timing of the installation of necessary 50MB fiber lines using MPLS technology with the company’s move to a new building last year.

“We wanted to leverage off the new [infrastructure] to have a complete presence for the employees who are really mobile — and that’s about half of them — so they can use smartphones and tablets for IM, phone, email and eventually videoconferencing,” explains CIO Johnston, adding that he’s evaluating Shoretel and Microsoft Lync suites to determine the best fit with the varying needs of his workers, who use a Microsoft desktop platform along with BlackBerries, iPhones and Android devices when on the go.

Johnston says he’s looking at doing a six-month phased-in deployment, with the engineering and sales departments getting access to the UC system first.

When the first implementation is complete, he envisions a system that will allow sales and engineering personnel to use smartphones and tablets to access their desktop software, participate in webconferences, collaborate with one another via voice and video, and share documents through online sites that employees are already using, such as LinkedIn and Dropbox.

“We plan on having complete collaboration using IM, email, voice and video platforms to integrate with our CRM, ERP, DCM and BI tools,” Johnston explains. “We’ve been working on a [bring-your-own-device] policy and how that will fit into our UC solution. Dropbox and other social networking tools have to be evaluated and will definitely have some play into the final UC process,” he says.

“We want to have that complete package, so wherever they are they can access whatever they need,” he adds. “It’s going to be through these touchpoints that we conduct business, and the real driver of [unified communications] is doing business.”

Pratt is a Computerworld contributing writer in Waltham, Mass. Contact her at marykpratt@verizon.net.

This version of this story was originally published in Computerworld‘s print edition. It was adapted from an article that appeared earlier on Computerworld.com.