The secret is simplicity

Everybody knows total cost of ownership goes much further than the upfront capital cost of a system, whether a unified communications system or otherwise.

What most people don’t see is the golden thread of simplicity that runs through low total cost of ownership (TCO) systems. It is apparent in all the elements of TCO and starts with bottom-up, internet protocol-based design.

A new generation of internet protocol-based communication vendors emerging in the last five to 10 years have been able to pursue legacy-free, pure internet protocol (IP) design, offering simplicity of implementation, operation and support. Without a pre-IP solution portfolio, these vendors were free to build solutions that fully leverage the power of IP communication at the core, with extensions into rich collaborative unified communication applications.

The savings possible with such a simple, unified architecture firstly means low upfront acquisition costs. The cost of development is dramatically lowered when skills are freely available.

Secondly, a unified solution set is possible on the back of IP, which allows an IT department to provision and administer all unified communications apps applicable to a user in one go via a single interface, which can be browser-based. Users can also be given one familiar tool from which to access their communication tools and media. All of this cuts down dramatically on the cost of implementation, training, provisioning and use of unified communications systems.

Integration into the enterprise is a largely trouble-free proposition with IP-based systems, which further cuts down on implementation costs.

The cost of baggage

But simplicity of design has not been easily achieved by the aforesaid newcomers to the voice landscape and it continues to confound legacy telephony vendors. The novice industry (Cisco, Mitel, Microsoft and ShoreTel) may have had the luxury of a clean slate, which allowed them to disrupt the traditional telephony market, but they were left figuring out the brave new IP communications world from scratch, almost on their own.

The legacy vendors, such as Lucent and Nortel, understood carrier-class quality of service but were stuck with a legacy of PSTN infrastructure that had to be extended with a wealth of new comms applications such as conferencing, if they were to survive. In the absence of IP skills, these apps were acquired, which presented an almighty integration problem for them.

In the end, the new kids on the block won out, but only after quality of service advances improved the quality of Voip, and innovations like distributed, appliance-based Voip platforms improved scalability and reliability. Since then uptake has accelerated to make IP communication the standard.

Contrary to belief
The overarching design principle of simplicity in IP systems gives the lie to current perceptions of high upfront cost and difficult, resource-intensive implementation of IP-based unified communications systems. Ground-up, IP-centric UC systems offer demonstrable savings throughout the TCO “stack” as well as trouble-free implementation, thanks to a large shared IP skills base.