Unified Communocations is without doubt the future of telecoms irrelevvant of the size or nature of your business, and Digital Exchange can offer hosted or CPE (Customer Premises Equpment) solutions to help your organisation operate more effectivley.

Don’t take our word for it; read the BBC news article below that was featured on http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14825020 earlier this month:

You’re sitting in the office with a client on the phone, ready to make the deal of your career.

They are ready to invest heavily in a shipment of your new and improved flux capacitor – a sale equivalent to the GDP of a medium sized African nation.

If you can clinch this you’ll be wearing a jet pack to fly up the greasy pole.

But the client wants to know if they can be delivered in three days – and he has to know now or he will go elsewhere. You need to find out if Bob in despatch can handle it.

But Bob isn’t answering the phone and you don’t know where he is, or who else may be able to help you.

Your dreams of early retirement on your yacht in the Caribbean slip away into the ether.

Is there anything that could have avoided this?

Well, if the hype is to be believed, unified communications (UC) may have saved the day.

Tech Talk

Jargon like this can seem daunting to those uninitiated in the dark arts of IT and telephony.

But what it actually means is bringing together all of the communication tools you use on a daily basis – phone, email, messaging, even video conferencing and social media – and running them from a single platform.

This should allow you to see where your staff are, if they’re available, if a colleague can help instead – in the office and also when they’re on the move – all from one simple interface.

You can then choose how you contact staff and customers.

Dial It In

Lebara provides low-cost international telephone calls.

At their contact centre in the City of London they expect to handle around 5m calls over the next year.

UC and a niche contact centre package is crucial to their customer services says Rodney Sheriff, Lebara’s head of customer service.

“We like to think of ourselves as best in class from a customer service perspective. ”

Having an integrated service means that the customer service centre is integrated with the back office operation.

“We can route customers calls to the best person to deal with their enquiries.

“We can leave messages for common-place queries so people can get fast access to that information, and if there is a problem it becomes very visible to us.

“The suite gives us instantaneous reporting so we can easily see that marketing, for example, have sent a message that’s been misunderstood by our callers, we can see a spike in calls in literally seconds, and we can respond right away.”

When agents aren’t busy, they can be redirected to customer courtesy calls, through a sophisticated “blended dialer” system. Customers can give feedback on the experience, and Lebara are able to analyse call data to make sure they have enough agents serving each country they operate in.

Matt Kemp is head of operations for customer services and he says that contrary to expectations, the system is easy to use.

“One of the beauties of the system is that I can probably train anyone to record a message and put it on in 10 minutes.”

“If we have a major issue we can get a message on there immediately.”

An industry specialist says this niche use of UC is just one of many.

“If you think about the different elements of UC, and you apply it to a business scenario here at Lebara, you have a front office and back office operation that need to be tightly integrated.

“If you have elements of the business that aren’t integrated, you end up with an ineffective way of dealing with customers, and perhaps a cultural set-up within the company that doesn’t allow you to be as flexible as you would like.”

Mr Moulton believes that the principles of UC can be applied to most businesses.

“If you think about the average day for the knowledge worker in any organisation – the things they have to process on an average day – email, voicemail, team meetings, collaboration, messaging, all of these things are now pretty prevalent on every employees desktop and they also by and large exist on mobile phones.

“If you want teams to be as productive and collaborative as they can be then you need to give them a common set of tools and applications to use on a daily basis, and these should integrate as seamlessly as possible with their telephony systems and messaging systems.”

Choices, Choices

There are no shortage of UC options – Microsoft, Cisco and Swyx are just some of the big names to choose from.

BT offers its own service, and also works with a range of UC providers.

“We think of ourselves as the great integrators,” says Steve Masters, head of global unified communications.

For him, collaboration is the key benefit of a UC system.

“It’s really about bringing your organisation far closer together, the ability to then extend that externally and have greater communications and collaboration with your partners.”

He acknowledges that cost can be a big consideration for smaller businesses.

“That market and the corporate markets are very different.

“They’re diametrically opposed almost. The corporate world views UC as a way of saving money, because there will be so much cost involved in running all these disparate systems.”

For a big multinational one factor is being able to move away from using the different technologies provided in different countries by telecoms providers.

“It’s not unknown for organisations to have voicemail systems in the hundreds across their organisations.

“So there there’s a need to move to a UC one to get better collaboration in the organisation but also to drive cost down in the business.

Mr Masters says that for a small single office operation however, the costs could be prohibitive with limited return on that investment.

He sees video as the next big growth area for the market.

“The analysts are all predicting great things for video over the next three years.

“When people are working remotely you can really enrich the dynamics of a remote meeting through having video.”

Changing Minds

Duncan Clark is UC specialist with analysts Canalys. He says although UC is nothing new, consumerisation – the drive from people inside companies to have technology that mirrors what they use at home – is changing perspectives.

“I guess people think of consumerisation in terms of people bringing in their own devices or going on the internet and using their own tools, I think it runs much deeper than that it’s actually the whole experience that people expect from their workplace that

“I think that’s what’s changed, and what’s really changing the focus, making UC more marketable to a wider audience.”

For companies considering adopting the technology, he says that cost doesn’t have to be a barrier.

“The beauty of UC is that it’s not necessary that you take the whole package, and I think that’s the thing that gets misunderstood.

“You don’t have to implement everything, it’s about saying what tools do I need to make the business work.”

“The reality is UC can make a huge difference but it’s something that’s difficult to measure in real terms.”

But he does have a few words of warning.

“The key thing for businesses is to really get the background information. I think there’s a severe lack of understanding about what the different aspects of UC will actually bring to your business.

“For example, you may think that video conferencing will bring benefits, but when you actually deploy it you find people aren’t using it.

“You need to look at what specific solution you choose, and how you implement it and use it in the business.”

Contact Digital Exchange to see how Unified Communications can benefit your business.

Improve the efficiency and availability of IT resources and applications through virtualization. Start by eliminating the old “one server, one application” model and run multiple virtual machines on each physical machine. Free your IT admins from spending so much time managing servers rather than innovating. About 70% of a typical IT budget in a non-virtualized datacenter goes towards just maintaining the existing infrastructure, with little left for innovation.

An automated datacenter built on the production-proven VMware virtualization platform lets you respond to market dynamics faster and more efficiently than ever before. VMware vSphere delivers resources, applications—even servers—when and where they’re needed. VMware customers typically save 50-70% on overall IT costs by consolidating their resource pools and delivering highly available machines with VMware vSphere.

• Run multiple operating systems on a single computer including Windows, Linux and more.
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• Build up business continuity through improved disaster recovery solutions and deliver high availability throughout the datacenter
• Improve enterprise desktop management & control with faster deployment of desktops and fewer support calls due to application conflicts

Why Your Company Should Virtualize

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Top 5 Reasons to Adopt Virtualization Software

1. Get more out of your existing resources: Pool common infrastructure resources and break the legacy “one application to one server” model with server consolidation.
2. Reduce datacenter costs by reducing your physical infrastructure and improving your server to admin ratio: Fewer servers and related IT hardware means reduced real estate and reduced power and cooling requirements. Better management tools let you improve your server to admin ratio so personnel requirements are reduced as well.
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For more information on virtulisation please contact us on 0800 073 1701, or email info@thedigitalgroup.co.uk.

Article re-blogged from www.vmware.com.

A leased line is a symmetric connection connecting two or more locations. It is sometimes known as a ‘Private Circuit’ or ‘Data Line’ in the UK. Unlike traditional phone lines it does not have a telephone number, but rather each end of the leased line being permanently inter-connected to the other. Leased lines can be used for transit of Internet services, traditional data or telephone calls (VoIP).

Typically, leased lines are used by businesses to connect geographically distant offices. Unlike dial-up connections, a leased line is always active with the fee for the connection being at fixed monthly rate, therefore allowing a business to fix its costs and prepare accurate future budgets. The main factors affecting the monthly fee are distance between end points and the speed (bandwidth) of the leased line. Because the connection is for the sole use of the subscribing business a leased line can be delivered with an a guaranteed service level agreement as apposed to other types of connectivity, such as ADSL, which don’t offer this assured level of quality.

We have a range of diverse leased line products, the majority of which can not be matched with regard to price and service. Please click here to check availability and pricing.

Landlines are a pre-requisite for most businesses and attract costs associated with their line rental and usage in relation to the volume of telephone calls made to the outside world.

You can transfer your existing telephone lines and associated phone numbers to Digital Exchange and benefit from guaranteed cost savings without comprising service. Transferring your lines is quick, easy and completely free of charge, and during the transition process there is no disruption of service as all work is done at “network level” meaning no physical changes are needed to your telephone system.

Once transferred you will receive your regular bills from Digital, which will include all line rentals and call usage charges, and as part of our service commitment we will evaluate your call profile to ensure you are always kept on the most cost effective tariff.

All that’s required to provide a no obligation quotation is for you to provide copies of your existing telephone bills, following which we will perform the necessary analysis and revert back with an accurate proposal. Please send in your bills via fax to 0114 221 0768 or email via sales@thedigitalgroup.co.uk. Alternatively if you have any questions about this service and would like more information please call us on 0114 221 2000.

Firstly, the term VoIP stands for Voice over Internet protocol, and is a technology that eliminates the need for separate voice and data networks by converging all IP traffic into one network. Both voice and data traffic can be transmitted over a common IP network to provide companies with fully integrated communications.

Adopting VoIP can offer a variety of benefits such as improved communication between offices and remote locations, the ability to introduce new network applications, whilst making significant cost savings through more effective use of your company’s network.

An IP-based business telephone system is appropriate if you wish to network multiple offices together, however, the technology doesn’t necessarily mean that multiple telephone systems are required in each location as it’s possible to have a centrally-based system that controls telephone handsets throughout your organisation’s estate. The result of this is a single solution that allows users to operate as though they were all located in the same office.

VoIP also allows remote workers to connect to the company’s core telephone system as if they were in the office, and is therefore a valuable tool for individuals who don’t have a static office location or are constantly on the move.

There are many other benefits of VoIP, and the alternate ways in which it can be designed are equally comprehensive. To learn more about the technology please call us on 0114 221 2000 or send an email to sales@thedigitalgroup.co.uk.