For 2010 and beyond, research firm Frost & Sullivan sees Web conferencing as a key catalyst for improving business processes by facilitating remote group decision-making and action. This paradigm shift repositions web conferencing as a strategic tool, not only an email or travel substitute. This Frost & Sullivan whitepaper describes the new communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) and links it to web conferencing/collaboration. The goal of CEBP is to help companies improve business processes by injecting communications into the processes themselves at key points to eliminate, or at least reduce, human latency around decision-making and action. Web conferencing is essential for CEBP, especially for processes that require high-level, strategic thinking, and remote group decision-making. Using the iLinc Suite to facilitate CEBP will help companies quickly take advantage of new opportunities by streamlining and increasing the speed and quality of decisions to boost sales numbers and positively impact the bottom line. Accordingly, companies using iLinc web collaboration can expect to see their return on investment increase as they flex iLinc’s power beyond saving money on travel and in-person meeting expenses.
Companies emerging from the recent economic downturn must stay competitive, maintain cost reductions and support virtual workplaces for employees while improving business process, productivity, and group decision-making. iLinc Suite was developed to address these challenges and more. Download Frost & Sullivan whitepaper for more information.
CONFERENCING IS AT THE FOREFRONT OF
ENTERPRISE COMMUNICATIONS
A Frost & Sullivan White PaperINTRODUCTION
As companies start making strategic technology decisions for 2010, they should pay closeattention to some of the bigger trends in business and IT for the coming year. These issueswill help shape how companies operate, and they will determine which technologyinvestments will deliver the biggest bang for the buck this year and into the future.
For starters, unified communications (UC) is about to get boring-despite the fact that themarket still is not in agreement on what, exactly, UC is. Some say it's the integration ofvoice, data and video communications, with presence information as the foundation. Otherssay companies can get an important UC experience simply by having an integrated set ofaudio, video and Web conferencing capabilities, or the ability to access corporateapplications and telephony features from a mobile device. And still others say the real valueof UC lies in the integration of communications and business processes and applications.
In fact, UC is all those things, and more. But end-users don't care about definitions, theycare about results, and there is no doubt that "unified" communications is the future ofcommunications. This year, people will spend less time worrying about whether what they'redoing is "UC" and more time actually doing it.
Howthey do it is the subject of heated discussion in the market, as more and moreorganizations see significant value in hosted, or cloud-based, communications (also referredto as "software as a service," or SaaS). Delivering communications applications as a serviceisn't a new idea, but today's technology offers some game-changing benefits that couldreveal themselves in the cloud in 2010.
Software as a Service Goes BigCloud-based applications have many benefits. They can be cost-effective, especially forcompanies with small or no IT departments, or few resources to spend on capital projects;they are easy to scale up or down as needed, and to update quickly and often; they breakcorporate boundaries, enabling inter-company collaboration long- or short-term; and theyare typically available from anywhere, on any device, making it especially appealing tobusinesses with remote and home-based employees.
What's more, thanks to multi-tenant architectures that allow service providers to scaletheir offerings to more customers without an equal scale in cost, vendors will be able toleverage the cloud model to cut their prices enough to make hosted services moreappealing than they've been before to many more organizations. This effort may be at leastpartly helped by virtualization, which provides a layer of abstraction between computerhardware systems and the software running on them, essentially separating the physicalfrom the rational. By providing a logical view of computing resources, rather than a physical
Frost & Sullivan 1one, virtualization tricks the operating system into thinking that a group of servers is asingle pool of computing resources, allowing managers to run multiple operating systemssimultaneously on a single machine.
Combine that new architecture with new applications that have been written specifically forWeb-based delivery models, and the ability to scale users up or down with a simple phonecall or Web interaction, and SaaS lets companies give their employees the most up-to-datesoftware, easily and cost-effectively. We expect to see significant interest in SaaS in themonths and years to come.
Social Media and the Virtual Workplace on the RiseAnother big trend for 2010 and beyond is that social media will become an official part ofenterprise communications. Our research shows that employees are using social mediatools in large numbers, and often their efforts are initiated by IT. But today, their usage ismainly limited to sales and marketing (i.e., outward-facing endeavors meant to build brandand deepen customer relationships) and generalized networking (on behalf of both thecompany and the end-users). We expect that to change-albeit slowly-so that over thenext several years, people start using enterprise-grade social networking tools to... [download for more]
