Unified communications, UC, “bridging the gap,” communications and collaboration, integrated communications ... it’s being talked about everywhere — magazine articles, news snippets, trade shows, software manufacturers and hardware manufacturers, among others. If you are in the phone, e-mail, chat, mobile or any other communications-related business, you are being barraged by the term “unified communications.”

As a consumer you should be wary of the term unified communications. If you are buying a solution and being told that you’re being presented with a unified communications solution, make sure you know what it is and — more importantly — what it is not. At the very least you should expect some integration between your phone system and your messaging (e-mail) platform. Expect that your provider can offer the ability to provide voicemail, fax, e-mail, text messaging, voice communications and calendaring in one synchronized platform.

True unified communications is an amazing concept. Imagine having only one device or software application to manage and integrate all of your voicemails, e-mails, Twitters, Facebook friends and updates, texts and any other inbound or outbound communication. Pretty powerful. The challenge here is that everyone is using the concept and more specifically the term unified communications or UC way too loosely. I have seen many companies advertising simple functions that lead us to believe that almost every phone system is a unified communications solution. For example, voicemail to e-mail. Just about every phone system implemented after 2005 can convert a voicemail to an audio file and send it to an e-mail address. Is this unified communications? I guess to a certain degree it is, but it is certainly not in the spirit of the innovative concept of the word. An e-mail in an inbox with an audio file attached is very basic. What makes the distinction here is that it is not truly integrated. For example, if you play this audio file on your PC, the voicemail on your PBX still shows as being new. This can create a confusing and un-integrated situation. Now when you go back through your voicemail on your phone, you have to listen to all of the voicemails that you already listened to on you PC. UC is supposed to create efficiency, not duplicate work.

It is important to realize that your business will most certainly gain productivity and cost savings from unified communications, but only from the truly innovative type of UC that furthers technology, not the kind that is a marketing ploy by those companies trying to keep up.

William R. Bumbernick is president and CEO of Alteva LLC. He has more than 10 years of senior management and entrepreneurial experience in telecom, IT and managed services. Since 1994, William has been involved in executive levels of leadership within the technology and telecommunications sectors.

As the stock market rollercoaster continues its ride, oil prices are falling and I am now filling up at less than $1.50 per gallon. If I had told you four months ago that we would be paying less than $2 per gallon for gas, you would have thought I was crazy. During the days of $4.25 per gallon gasoline, every newspaper, news station, Internet blog and Internet news site had multiple stories on not only the oil crisis, but also on heavy conservation initiatives (the “green” movement). Instead of the automobile industry talking about government bailouts, they were competing to see who could be first to build the greenest machine on the planet.

So where have all of the environmental initiatives gone? Sure you see one every now and again, but the mainstream media has, for the most part, abandoned the groups that care about the long-term health and survival of our planet. The stories have changed and mostly revolve around the economies of our time. It is important to recognize that the economy is — when put into perspective — a short term issue. It will rebound; people will start spending again, unemployment will drop, interest rates will rise, etc. After the rebound, where will the environment be? Some experts argue that we are damaging Earth exponentially each year, while others think humans are arrogant to believe our species could affect such change on a planetary level.

So what should we do, if anything? Many times in business I receive advice from experts that seems to come from opposite ends of the spectrum. When posed with such information, I of course look at all of the data available and try to choose a wise position. But occasionally the information doesn’t point to a clear direction. At these times, I look back and remember the advice my grandmother would have given me in not so many and not so eloquent words. Pearl, as her friends appropriately called her, was full of pearls of wisdom. She had grown up during the depression in a dire community outside of Atlanta. Perhaps because of this, she had an amazing ability to peel away all of the gibberish around a situation and sum it up in five or six words that cut straight to the heart of the matter. Her vision was so clear and so on target, most of the time I couldn’t help but wonder, “How could I have missed that?” Her clarity greatly simplified decision making.

In regards to the environment, when I am torn between whether I should follow the advice of the scientists that paint a doomsday scenario or the ones that believe there is nothing that we can do to change the course of the planet, I can almost hear Pearl saying, “It’s better to be safe than sorry!”.

We have nothing to lose and everything to gain if we move towards the side of conservation and environmentalism. If we believe in the scientists who think our course is unalterable and they are wrong, we have everything to lose.

Businesses, as a whole, can affect the environment with exponential results when compared to the efforts of individuals. When a company chooses to become green and take sincere initiatives to improve the world in which we live, they are making an investment in future generations of employees and customers. It always interests me how much employers talk about how they care for their employees and their employees’ families, but when I ask what specific green initiatives they have undertaken in the past year, they usually can’t offer up much. So how is it that employers care so much about their employees but cannot commit to the future health and wellbeing of their employees, their children, and the generations to come by investing something into cleaning up our environment? This investment doesn’t need to involve capital. It could be coordinating a company sponsored community cleanup, putting recycle bins next to the copier, implementing a paper reduction initiative, putting motion sensors on the lights of infrequently used rooms or any number of very simple and low cost ways to reduce greenhouse gases.

Here at Alteva we not only embrace initiatives in our day-to-day operations, we also offer a product that is truly green. When a customer chooses a Hosted VoIP provider for service over a premise-based solution, they contribute to an overall reduction in resources (and costs) of power and cooling by up to 84 percent. These energy reductions also imply a reduction in carbon dioxide gas emissions produced as a byproduct of generating electricity. Based on our subscriber base and the reduction of premise-based equipment, we estimate Alteva reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 900,000 pounds per year. This is equivalent to the emissions generated in 64 average homes annually.

Businesses have the opportunity and responsibility to be good stewards of the environment. Please encourage the company where you work and the business leaders with whom you work to accept the responsibility to help protect the world our children and our children’s children will inherit from us.

William R. Bumbernick is president and CEO of Alteva LLC. He has more than 10 years of senior management and entrepreneurial experience in telecom, IT and managed services. Since 1994, William has been involved in executive levels of leadership within the technology and telecommunications sectors.

The holidays are here and what better time to talk telecom than after a full plate of holiday joy? Seriously though, the holidays are a time for visiting with family and friends, as well a time to evaluate this past year’s success (or lack of) in the telecom space. Whether it is increasing concern over Qwest’s growing $1.27 billion in convertible debt or reports that the wireless carriers are flourishing even in this troubled economy, with AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile and Metro PCS in the U.S. and Rogers Wireless in Canada all reporting double-digit revenue growth in the third quarter, it is abundantly clear that the innovators will prosper while the “old school” of telecom will be left in the classroom as a boring history lesson.

We are seeing it across the board: Companies that are innovating during this time of economic turmoil are both growing and prospering. The reason? Business customers are looking for ways to streamline their businesses.

Real World Scenario

Alteva, a hosted VoIP provider, recently acquired a customer who was on a competitor’s hosted IP-PBX platform. The customer’s executive team was tasked with strategic reductions in costs to accommodate a corresponding loss in revenues. More specifically, their goal was to find ways to reduce their costs without sacrificing service. Their annual spend with our competitor was just over $280,000. One of their strategies for cost reductions was to find possible ways to integrate systems and enhance reporting capabilities to uncover efficiencies and subsequently reduce costs. They went to their previous carrier and asked for the capability to integrate their existing CRM and workflow applications with the hosted telecom platform. The answer was a resounding “no!” The carrier sited security and stability concerns and politely let the customer know that they didn’t offer any integration capabilities. Looking to find a way to make the most of their existing investment of phones, the customer started looking for a replacement carrier that did allow integration capabilities and found Alteva. The sales, engineering, and application development teams at Alteva came together to create a secure and stable API front end that allowed the customer to integrate not only their CRM and workflow applications, but also live call detail record feeds to their reporting systems.

Within 90 days after implementation, the customer was able to realign their resources, reduce their operating expenses much more than originally expected and increase their customer satisfaction scores across the board. In addition, they are seeing an uptick in revenues which they attribute to some of the changes that were made.

It would be foolish to assume that Alteva’s capabilities were totally responsible for creating the savings for this customer, but they certainly were an integral part.

Key Accomplishments

• By integrating their existing Web-based self-help system with their telephony infrastructure and a hosted IVR, this customer was able to reduce inbound support calls by 18 percent.
• CRM and auto dialer integration allowed for a reduction of nearly 87 percent in call processing time. Previously, sales reps on calling campaigns as well as service center representatives making callbacks were initiating calls from the keypads on their phones. The average time to process an outbound dial was 7.8 seconds. After integrating the CRM and service workflow applications with their telephony platform, their dial times were reduced to just under one second.
• Hosted call recording and intelligence metrics allowed for a reduction in training time. With the capability of tagging successful sales calls for recording, the sales teams were able to integrate actual calls into the training programs, not only reducing the actual training time and expenses for new sales associates, but also improving the call to meeting rate across the board.
• Using intelligence metrics to identify caller or callee trending, the customer was able to create more efficient workflow by routing callers more appropriately and reducing unnecessary manual routing stops along the way.

With all of the development and addition of new features (IVR, auto dialer, call recording), the customer increased their telecom spend by just over 30 percent. These features enabled their business to become much more lean and efficient across the board and accomplish their overall cost savings goals.

The Winners and Losers

The customer was obviously a big winner, as they reached their goals. Alteva was also a winner, as they not only acquired a new customer, but also increased the customer’s spend in the process.

The loser isn’t just the carrier that lost this business, but all of the carriers who refuse to innovate and enable their customers through out-of-the-box thinking and capabilities.

The Lesson

So what’s the lesson here? The old school of disparate systems are a thing of the past. Businesses in general are looking for easy and effective ways to bring processes and systems together so that more can be done with less. Businesses today should be looking for the dual ROI — not only a return on investment, but also a return on innovation.

William R. Bumbernick is president and CEO of Alteva LLC. He has more than 10 years of senior management and entrepreneurial experience in telecom, IT and managed services. Since 1994, William has been involved in executive levels of leadership within the technology and telecommunications sectors.