Recently I was asked for an opinion regarding the actual direct and indirect cost benefits of Unified Communications. For those that dont know - unified communications defines the set of technologies (email, phone (voip), video conferencing, IM, faxing, etc) that people can use to communicate with each other all integrated together in a simple to access framework. This framework is designed to increase personal productivity by making everyday tasks take less time to accomplish and to reduce corporate costs by eliminating or reducing certain overheads such as phone bills.

Unified Communications is not going to make a difference to every company - I have seen companies with single locations try to make ROI claims of personal productivity and cost savings that were a little more faith based then I would like. I have also worked with multi-location and multi-national corporations that have saved direct costs from reduced travel and phone bills, and have been able to show reduced time to get the job done because of the lack of time wasted in travel and waiting on others. This can also be true in highly mobile companies with workforces distributed across a geographic region. Just the use of integrated Instant Messaging with Presence has been a big time saver for some of our customer companies where people used to drop by offices or wait for people to get off the phone by calling over and over again.

I have also worked with companies like Cbeyond, which is a managed service provider that provides some of the key unified communication services as part of their services bundle. They state that leveraging the outsourced model for IT and communications services, ROI can be achieved for the small business even if it is based on a single headquarters location. Their services include the bundling of email, mobile communications, Internet, phone services, faxing, and other business enabling / communications tools. This ROI is easier to calculate because you get to skip the capital costs and just focus on the monthly bill for the services. The personal productivity is also easier to calculate because the bundle of services in the hosted model generally exceeds what the company could afford as separate solutions - so you get the natural boost of having more tools to bring to bear on business processes.