Understanding how UC Supports Return on Investment (ROI)

Unified communication investments underpin an enterprise’s entire communication system—and the cost of implementing is not a trivial. Companies can lose money and waste time and bandwidth by not optimizing their UC programs.  

There are many ways in which UC creates value for a company, most notably through productivity boosting and as a cost-cutting tool.

How else does UC support your ROI?

Where UC and ROI Decisions Meet  

Manager and executive put thought, research, and effort into how resources are invested across the company. These informed decisions can make a huge impact.

Any form of investment, whether it be a contribution to an employee, equity, or software, needs to be well thought out to generate the most return. UC infrastructure is no exception.

How UC Creates Hard ROI 

ROI is best realized when the earnings are something visible and concrete–Hard ROI. Hard ROI for a UC solution can take a few forms:

  •      Expected cost avoidance
  •      Productivity improvements
  •      Added revenue
  •      Reduced costs

ROI in Practice 

Suppose a firm with 100 employees spends an average of $1,000 on UC infrastructure per employee. This means that for UC to be a smart investment, it would have to increase revenue and cut costs by a minimum of $100,000 per year. This firm also closes 100 projects a year totaling $1M in revenue per year. If this business utilized UC to close an additional 15% of their projects per year, that would lead to a $150,000 increase in revenue. By adding this cost to the reduced travel expenses, you have a positive ROI.

While this example is rough, it lays out a comprehensive idea of how UC can be a formidable driver behind creating value.

ROI Case Study: Abbvie Pharmaceuticals  

Abbvie, a leading research-driven, biopharmaceutical company with 28,000 employees worldwide, has a corporate initiative to act like a startup. For them, this meant looking at expense management, reducing travel costs and time away from the lab; especially high priced international trips. And specifically for the IT organization it meant enabling the 28,000 teammates with tools to bridge the distance of their communication. Leveraging the business analytics secured out of the Vyopta solution, Abbvie realized a savings of $3 million and 85,000 productivity hours in the travel time last year.

More ROI for your UC?

The key to a high ROI for UC is making informed decisions through analysis yet aggregating all of the statistics you need to ensure your investment is in use is often painstaking, manual, and requires the use of bandwidth that might not already exist.

Through Vyopta’s multi-platform tool vAnalytics, our customers can further analyze their video environment to make educated decisions about managing their environment to get the most out of their UC investments including business insights and UC investment management capabilities.  vAnalytics is another productivity tool for companies that have invested in UC. Join us at Cisco Live in the Collaboration Village for a live demo of our solution or visit our website to try our demo.

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