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In: Computer Science

The Power of Unified Communications Chapter 7 highlights the power of the "Network." Advances in networking...

The Power of Unified Communications

Chapter 7 highlights the power of the "Network." Advances in networking technology have made the internet possible and have provided the underpinning for a revolution in communications. The Macy's RFID (radio frequency identification) case study at the beginning of the chapter highlights the power of wireless networking in particular. As defined by the text, Unified Communications allows companies to merge disparate modes of communication into a single service. This is akin to the technology that underpins the "triple play" packages offered by cable and telecommunications providers alike which combines video, internet, and phone in one package.

By doing a search of the internet or by other research methods, find an example, or a case study, of an organization that has used Unified Communications to their advantage.

Ponder these questions:

1) What business problem was this organization trying to solve?

2) What was the current state of their communications technology infrastructure?

3) What unified communications technologies did they decide to deploy? What were the key components of this system?

4) How did they improve their business by implementing unified communications?

5) What do you believe the future holds for unified communications?

Solutions

Expert Solution

With the help of a case study we will try to ponder over the following scenarios/queries:

Premise: A big material handling subsidiary of Toyota motors has a presence over more than 10 locations and corporate campuses which handles both the logistics and sales division of the company.

  1. What business problem was this organization trying to solve?
  1. As their campus was scattered across multiple locations primary requirement was to have robust system to connect all of them and provide a seamless system to do telephonic, conferencing and Instant messaging service.

  1. What was the current state of their communications technology infrastructure?
  1. As we know communications are the lifestreams of any sales organization. In order to communicate and keep track of the internal as well as external happenings, there was a complex system of phone and messaging services. Also, this system was not supporting remote collaborative meetings.
  2. Moreover, there was a traditional PBX (Public Branch Exchange) with separate email and instant messaging systems. There was no clean way of making the different systems work seamlessly also, the setup at every location has variation which could take hours to figure out and establish any single instance of meetings or workflows.
  3. The lack of standardization was making it the overall system very expensive and error-prone.

  1. What unified communications technologies did they decide to deploy? What were the key components of this system?

They went ahead with the CISCO powered UC platform which is cloud-based.

Key components:

  1. Instead of an old PBX system, the UC based solution completely VOIP based.
  2. Jabber is the client interface of Cisco’s UC platform and provides integrated Instant Messaging, corporate directory, voice calls over Wi-Fi and OTP based identification for smartphones.

  1. How did they improve their business by implementing unified communications?
  1. The VOIP implementation is way more reliable for a corporate environment having access to reliable internet and is cost-effective as you are paying just for the overall package and internet service.
  2. Jabber has in-built features of screen sharing and conferencing which opened new ways to interact and collaborate on an idea.
  3. An instant messaging application has a host of features like saving conversation, broadcasting messages etc.
  4. Setting up teleconferencing and meeting remotely became way easier and dialing became integrated into a single system.
  1. What do you believe the future holds for unified communications?

From above we came across different pain points and areas of improvement. we can clearly see that unified communication is progress in the right direction and as further advances are made in this filed especially with the help of cloud deployment the pricing will reduce and scalability would increase. As more and more providers like Microsoft, Google and CISCO are making progresses we will see the proliferation of UC across small to medium sized firms as well.


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