As more organizations look to deploy a unified communications (UC) solution to reap the promised benefits of better and more efficient collaboration and communications across the business, the cost saving benefits are drawing more attention. UC solutions such as Microsoft Lync are being deployed to reduce travel costs, existing telephony and Web conferencing costs, as well as physical office space costs as remote workers are effectively working from anywhere.
A recent survey commissioned by Dimensional Research on Lync Adoption and Challenges confirms that for organizations that have adopted Microsoft Lync:
• 80% hoped to save on their travel budgets
• 76% hoped to reduce costs of other Web and teleconferencing tools
• 66% hoped to reduce meeting room space costs
• 55% hoped to reduce spending on traditional telephony costs (e.g. desk phones)
• 36% hoped to reduce email expenses
Despite these intentions, survey results showed that over half of organizations did not know if they were successful in achieving any of these desired outcomes.
The survey confirms that close to 70% of companies that have adopted Lync cannot easily report on savings, which means proving how much cost savings a UC solution brings to the table is difficult.
The primary challenge in determining UC cost savings is establishing comparable cost metrics for existing non-UC costs such as telephony, travel, and meeting rooms. This is difficult because:
1. Existing non-UC costs are usually lumped together with other costs and not sufficiently granular to be used in a cost comparison scenario
2. Existing non-UC costs are usually only available for a pre-determined business segment and time-frame (e.g. "the travel expenses for Q1 for the sales department")
3. Many existing non-UC costs are driven by employee behavior and quantifying behavior change is not an exact science
Despite these challenges, it is possible to gain an approximate understanding of cost savings, which is very valuable in understanding the competitive edge a UC solution brings to the business.
Here is a high level, 3-step approach to gauge how much money a UC solution, such as Microsoft Lync, is saving for your organization. The focus compares ongoing usage costs instead of initial capital deployment costs. Capital costs for deploying a UC solution need to be considered as well, but are typically driven by budgets and become less significant from a cost savings perspective over the lifetime of a UC solution.
Step 1: Measure
Being able to quantify how much your UC solution is being used is an important first step. Not having any usage statistics is akin to trying to calculate fuel efficiency without a car's mileage.
For an on-premises Microsoft Lync deployment, this base requirement equates to knowing feature usage and summary amounts, which are broken down into business segments that make sense for your company over a variety of time frames (i.e. 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 1 year). For a UC solution being consumed in the cloud, such as Lync Online, on-going subscription costs can be used, but usage will typically still provide a better yardstick for cost comparisons.
Microsoft Lync Server 2013 natively includes a Monitoring service, which provides the ability to collect and store Call Detail Records (CDRs). Enabling this feature will configure Lync to record Lync usage across the entire media stack, including peer-to-peer calls and all types of conferencing for all users.
The bigger challenge is making sense of all CDR information captured in the database. Being able to report on how much a feature was used by a user, department, or office with absolute and summary counts over different time frames is a necessary prerequisite to quantify and compare UC costs. Microsoft Lync ships with some native reports, which provide basic shorter-term usage metrics. More in-depth usage reporting and analysis, which are integrated with Active Directory to better understand usage and costs across your business segments, are available from several third parties.
Step 2: Determine Microsoft Lync Costs
Ongoing usage costs for Microsoft Lync must be known – or even approximated - to compare against existing non-UC costs. For example, if Company XYZ spent $200,000 last year on a non-UC audio conferencing solution, we need an approximate cost for Microsoft Lync conference usage where the audio and dial-in features were used.
With access to the usage metrics discussed in the previous step, costs per Lync feature usage such as the per minute cost of a Lync audio conference can be assigned, and total costs can then be calculated and viewed for comparison purposes.
Companies often struggle assigning an initial usage costs (aka charge) for a Lync feature because it is a nebulous combination of costs (such as bandwidth, licensing, and IT staff). A good start is to assign a ballpark cost based on the high-level, ongoing Lync costs, such as the variable costs just mentioned, and then fine-tune it. Seeing the summary cost numbers with these first-cut estimates offers insight and often leads to quick refinement and a better reflection of true cost.
Step 3: Compare Apples-to-Apples
Often the most difficult challenge to gauging UC cost savings is being able to do an apples-to-apples comparison with existing non-UC cost reports. Although traditional existing cost reports, such as travel expenses, are available in various data sources throughout the organization, they are typically hard-coded for a particular segment of the business (e.g. user or business unit) and only available in summary form for a specific timeframe (e.g. per quarter or last year).
Comparing these costs then requires that our corresponding Lync cost reports are available for the same time frame (e.g. "1 year"), for the same business segment (e.g. "sales department"), and for a Lync feature that is similar to what is being compared to in the existing non-UC report (e.g. "Lync Web conferencing" versus "airfare and lodging costs").
Here is a sample chargeback report showing the cost of Microsoft Lync Audio/Video Conferencing usage in the last quarter for the Sales department in a fictitious company using assigned rates for per minute usage:
Cost savings that depend on user behavior, such as a reduction in email usage, are harder to quantify. Even an approximation can provide valuable insight. Many companies have reporting tools for each collaboration platform. Simply trending and comparing the usage change before and after UC features are adopted provide a good yardstick for measuring cost savings in this area. Microsoft Lync reporting solutions that provide data on other platform usage (e.g. email) as well as Lync usage make this challenge easier.
Summary
Assessing the cost savings of a Unified Communications solution such as Microsoft Lync is a complex endeavor. An apples-to-apples comparison is challenging given the variability of existing non-UC costs and the absence of existing Microsoft Lync usage costs.
Measuring existing Lync usage, assigning a cost to it that makes sense for your business, and having access to the corresponding aggregate costs with the same parameters for existing non-UC costs are available is a huge step in understanding whether your UC solution is meeting expectations.
Curtis Johnstone, Unified Communication (UC) product architect with Dell Software and a Microsoft Lync MVP
