Quote of the day

The most profitable deals I ever made, has often been the deals where I felt a need for helping others achieve a goal. When you commit two partners to the same goal, you will experience the greatest experience of all time

Rasmus Foged, 2009

Unified Communications – Fits perfectly for the SaaS world!

Unified Communications (UC)- It is just another buzz? I will actually beg to disagree, through different compelling factors

• First of all, social networking is growing rapidly. Face book is used by 1/3 of all internet users at some point in time, and the tendency of using social networking is growing more and more. The combination of social networking and instant messaging (from ICQ to MSN) give companies a real tool to combine the two worlds, while having a business benefit – I will get back to this later.
• E-mail is becoming a pain. Let’s face reality 8 out of 10 people hate e-mails. It is time consuming and people react to the usage like it was a phone. UC have the opportunity to increase the usage of “phone style” communication, while having the benefits from e-mail by record tracking and presence information.
• A new research shows that normal face-to-face meeting of an average of 1hour, 20 minutes is being reduced to 40 minutes while using online meeting facilities (WebEx, Live Meeting etc.). This is very compelling and gives every company a direct solution to lower meeting costs, not only on travel expense, but purely on increased business productivity.

So why does this suit SaaS?
The majority of all UC solution is either expensive in implementation and hardware/software, and often the deployment of Unified Communications is scheduled over a long implementation period, and the groups of innovators in companies are the movers of the technology and the adoption is long from the laggards. SaaS enabled you to soft-ramp implement the solution, as a low-entry cost and having the lever to turn down the whole project if the organization turns down the solution.

• Enterprise is on the move for SaaS. Unified Communications is a SMB/Enterprise tool, where the usage and business increase is most compelling. Enterprise companies demand on-demand (SaaS) offering, where UC fits perfect with a true service oriented solution.

Let’s not UC with video conferencing, but Unified Communications is here to stay, as an experience for companies, organizations and groups. The technology still pushed new boundaries and we often see new areas of usage – online doctor meetings, assistance for car problems etc. With the move of mobility the wave 2 of UC will be initiated.