Benefits

Five Waves of Value

Unified Communications is now one of the top two strategic technologies for organizations. Companies of all sizes, including more than 85% of Fortune 500 companies, use Cisco's network-centric approach to build competitive advantage. Cisco Unified Communications is designed to deliver five distinct waves of business value.

1. Cost Savings Through Consolidation
The first wave occurs when migrating to IP telephony. Consolidating voice, video, and data networks onto a single IP network makes it possible for companies to reduce the cost of communications, take advantage of underused network capacity, and lay a foundation for unified communications.
2. The Companywide Collaboration Effect
The second wave of value comes when you extend applications, such as unified clients, IM, presence, and unified messaging across the business. The more unified communications applications you use, the greater the overall benefits. With unified communications, you can obtain up to two hours of more productive work from individuals each day. Research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey (formerly Sage Research) calls this "The Collaboration Effect"
3. Transforming Business Processes The third wave of business value is achieved by embedding unified communications into business processes. High-end Japanese retailer, Mitsukoshi, embedded unified communications capabilities in its inventory application to optimize the customer experience in one of its biggest profit centers. In the six months that Mitsukoshi piloted its unified communications-enable RFID inventory application it:
   • Increased top line growth by 113% over the previous year
   • Reduced its sales cycle time by 20%
   • Dramatically improved customer satisfaction
4. Streamlining Business Processes
The fourth wave of business value occurs through extending unified communications to customers and partners. When United Kingdom-based JJ Food Service extended unified communications capabilities to its most important customers, it achieved a $6.5 million gain in productivity in its contact centers by reducing the number of transfers and callbacks. This reduction was accomplished by tightly integrating the contact center with its customer relationship management (CRM) application, and by taking advantage of the intelligent call routing capabilities of unified communications to dramatically streamline the process.
5. Boundary-Free Collaboration
The fifth wave of business value is boundary-free collaboration. Cisco and a large Japanese company used the network as a platform for global collaboration. The two companies partnered to co-develop and co-brand a solution that gave Cisco more presence in the Asian market. The solutions also helped the Japanese company win 60% of a larger custoemr's core network business worth 30 billion yen in the first two years. With the ability to collaborate across boarders and enterprise boundaries, Cisco and its partner achieved important objectives that neither would have reached as easily alone.