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BT: Meeting the collaboration challenge
BT: Meeting the collaboration challenge
Challenge
As a pioneer of flexible working BT wants to capitalise on the transformational possibilities offered by unified communications and collaboration
Solution
BT has successfully integrated telephony and messaging applications from a range of vendors creating a UCC platform supporting 50,000 users
Value
Flexible working underpinned by UCC saved £229.3 million in one year from reduced travel plus £60 million in accommodation costs
Collaboration is key
Organisations today are increasingly judged on their ability to collaborate, both within themselves and with external partners. As a global solutions provider, BT must be seen to be a leader in such communications-led phenomena: nothing less will do. The company was, for example, one of the forerunners in allowing its people to work flexibly. However, implementing the requisite technologies within existing business frameworks was proving difficult. Looking back a couple of years, time was being wasted struggling to contact and co-operate with people working from home, out on the road, or in other time zones.
Ian Parnell, Sales Director for Unified Communications and Collaboration in BT Global Services, explains: “In isolation, some new technologies simply replace one product with another, without bringing about significant change. Now, the world is waking up to the transformational possibilities offered by unified communications and collaboration, and related areas such as communications-enabled business processes.”
Unified communications and collaboration (UCC) enables people to communicate – and be communicated with – in the way that suits them best at any moment in time. To achieve this, UCC employs two fundamentally important concepts. It gives a single identity to individuals wherever they are – for example, on the desktop, on the move, or on the web. And it also confers the concept of presence, which enables people to know the mode in which someone else is operating and offers the communications tools that are exactly right for that context.