Mobile mania spurs demand for unified communications

Computerworld - In the space of just the past 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 the company's employees be 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."

Computerworld - In the space of just the past 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 the company's employees be 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."

Integrated, always-there communications is a tall order, considering that about half of the Lyndhurst, N.J. company's 200 employees are fully mobile, conducting most of their business on smartphones and tablets.

That's where unified communications comes into play.

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

[Unified communications] is very important for our company as we go out and work with our customers and partners.

Art Johnston, CIO, ATC

"The idea is that all of that -- all that different kind of communications -- exists in a single interface," explains Melanie Turek, an analyst at technology research company Frost & Sullivan.

In a perfect UC environment, an employee could receive a call on his mobile phone from someone who dialed his office line; join a web conference 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 an urgent question, using an easy-to-navigate single 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 Q2 of 2012 for most of ATC's sales force 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," Johnston says.

UC heats up

Unified communications has been around for years, but interest among IT leaders was often more theoretical than practical, and infrastructure and cost obstacles held back widescale implementation at many organizations (see UC's return on investment: Difficult to calculate).

That's changing, Turek says. 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 Inc. reports that worldwide enterprise spending on UC components has gone from nearly $17.8 billion in 2008 to $16.5 billion in 2010 and should reach $18.7 billion in 2013.