Global organizations are taking a more focused approach to cost-cutting opportunities that won’t negatively impact their competitive advantage. By doing so, businesses have limited spending for strategic initiatives and are seeking ways to outsource non-core areas of their business.
As a result, the adoption of hosted and managed services are being strongly considered and chosen as a way of meeting organizations’ IT & telecommunications needs.
Most large enterprises have made a start in the deployment of IPT but absent a compelling ROI for basic IPT voice/voicemail few enterprises have chosen wholesale replacement of legacy technology for IPT.
Several events are now combining to accelerate the replacement of old communication technology within the enterprise:
- Continuing end-of-life on legacy gear
- Recognition of the increasing ROI as new technology goes beyond IPT (voice/voicemail) to true collaboration
These two motivations have now been joined by a third and more compelling ROI ingredient driven by the opportunity for the enterprise to outsource the management of the new technology to a service provider. These management choices have become available, and are appealing to the enterprise, for the following reasons:
- Rapidly increasing complexity of the technology and the shorter lifespan of each generation puts added burden on the enterprise’s IT staff
- Increasing acceptability of outsourcing in the IT world allowing the enterprise to focus its staff on its core business
- The ability of the outsourcer to cover the initial capital cost of the equipment and provide a cost/seat/month model to the enterprise
This management choice has been supplemented by a hosted model where the service provider puts the head-end and application servers into the cloud. In order to limit capital expenditures, reduce operating costs and address the over-extension of limited in-house IT staff, the outsourcing of collaboration services becomes more economical than buying and managing everything internally.
The SMB market, where dedicated infrastructure can rarely be economically justified, can now gain access to the latest collaboration features that are otherwise not justifiable economically, nor could be supported due to a lack of operational expertise.
