02 Costs

Bad meetings are more expensive than good ones

Siloed collaboration tools lead to inflated costs

What makes collaboration expensive:

For most organizations, collaboration spending breaks down into four main areas:

The initial capital investment in architecture, endpoints, licenses, etc.
The operational IT expenses to support the strategy
Connectivity and telecommunications costs
Support contracts and integration expenses

For companies using siloed, un-integrated infrastructure, these costs are higher across the board. Conference services that are not integrated with telephony, video, and messaging tools, for example, add additional costs, contracts, and IT complexity to the equation.

Likewise, leveraging disparate directory, calendar, call, and security solutions adds expensive and on-going integration costs and fractures the user experience.

In our experience, many organizations have built their collaboration strategies over time. Investments in technologies have been made incrementally with the goal of addressing
user needs. This piecemeal approach leads to heavily siloed environments and disconnected
user experiences.

On average, fragmented
architecture leads to:

To spend less, manage less

Directory. Calendar. Calling. Video chat, IM, and virtual meeting rooms. Customer care tools. Organizations find themselves employing collaboration platforms made up of a variety of siloed services and solutions, often from a variety of vendors.

Knitting them together into something usable is a time-consuming task, and one that requires a lot of daily IT involvement to maintain. Getting to know a range of management interfaces adds complexity, too.

To reduce the burden on your IT team and drive down operational costs, employ a more unified approach that reduces integration efforts and streamlines IT staff’s workflow.

Forrester’s findings on the cost of solution sprawl

“ For every tool in an organization, there are license fees and support costs. By consolidating tools, organizations reduced their overall communications costs. One interviewee listed off all the tools the organization was paying for; the organization was spending an estimated extra $200,000 per year that it eliminated.”

Source: The Total Economic Impact™ Of Cisco Webex Meetings + Devices, October 2019

“We can’t leave all our existing investments
behind when we move to cloud.”

Collaboration challenge

To reduce costs while improving the user experience, the cloud
provides an attractive and flexible answer. But many executives find themselves with sizable existing investments in on-premises services
and endpoints.

The answer is a hybrid approach that seamlessly ties together
on-premises investments and cloud solutions. The key
to success is moving the right services and users to cloud platforms,
at the right time—enabling better collaboration without business disruption.