Social UC ROI Elements Exploring Return On Investment

IBM Collaboration Solutions Social UC ROI Elements

SOCIAL UC ROI ELEMENTS
Exploring Return On Investment Scenarios
Inspired By IBM’s
Social Unified Communications
January 2012

By Thierry Batut

Program Manager
Unified Communications
South West Europe

IBM Software Group
IBM Social Business and Collaboration Solutions Software

Contact:
thierry.batut@fr.ibm.com

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Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................................................4
UC and Social Business: More in Common Than You Think........................................................................................... 5
Social business delivers real business value..............................................................................................................5
Why Social Business and Unified Communications are linked?................................................................................. 5
Why companies need to think about Unified Communications & Collaboration?...........................................................10
Communications Enables Business Processes & Applications.................................................................................11
The business value of implementing a UC² strategy - the analyst view......................................................................... 12
ROI examples from customers using IBM Sametime................................................................................................... 15
ROI Elements – two case studies.................................................................................................................................. 17
‘CarParts’ - the Workplace for Change..................................................................................................................... 17
IBM, the Sametime ROI story................................................................................................................................... 20
Green Computing ROI................................................................................................................................................... 22
Customer Contact Center ROI.......................................................................................................................................23
Video Communications ROI.......................................................................................................................................... 28
VIDEO is ready for business.....................................................................................................................................29
BYOD is changing the game.................................................................................................................................... 30
What about real ROI?............................................................................................................................................... 32
Desktop Video ROI from IBM................................................................................................................................... 33
Sametime Unified Telephony ROI..................................................................................................................................34
Call to action and conclusion......................................................................................................................................... 37
Resources for further exploration.................................................................................................................................. 38
Sources......................................................................................................................................................................... 39

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Introduction
By now there is sufficient and independent evidence that there is an ROI on Unified Communications and
Collaboration or UC². The objective of this paper is to explore how customers realize cost savings and revenue gains
from implementing and integrating with Social Business strategies. We will explore which ROI and TCO categories are
responsible for the largest contribution either in savings or revenue gain. By doing this we want to inspire you to think
about how your company can benefit from Unified Communications.

More often than not ROI discussions are either far too generic to be believable – “product X increases productivity” -
or over optimistic - “product Y will reduce travel costs with 75%”. In contrast, this discussion is infused with real
examples of actual benefits observed in businesses all over the world.

The objective is not to discuss Unified Communication products or features, nor are we talking about IP and
Converged Networks. This is about the Social Collaborative Desktop and its positive impact on business. Asking
‘What is the ROI on UC?²’ is a valid but too broad a question. We break it down into measurable ROI elements.

We will start with a short overview of IBM Social UC in the context of global trends and organizational developments.
We'll review expert opinion by market analysts. After that we will dive straight into concrete business examples. Next
we will perform a deep dive into ROI benefits with two case studies – an automotive parts company and IBM. Video
and Telephony have their own unique benefits and we will review various aspects of these solutions. One area of
business is very conducive to 'ROI elements', namely Customer Contact Centers. This paper would not be complete
without mentioning Green Computing especially as IBM is considered a leader in this space.

The ROI categories we review are the key elements we encounter when talking about the value of Social UC. The
customer examples are based on real-life experience. Of course each client situation will have a somewhat different
set of capabilities and benefits.

We have found very similar results in all of our use cases. The following 6 categories or ROI Elements have
consistently delivered ROI and/or cost reductions for customers:

1. Process optimization
2. Communications
3. People Productivity
4. Access to knowledge & information
5. Competitive Advantage
6. Travel

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UC and Social Business: More in Common Than You
Think
Social business delivers real business value
Becoming a social business requires a long-term, strategic approach to business culture, executive leadership, an
effective corporate strategy, and organizational ability to recognize and design for transformation.
Organizations that successfully transform into social businesses are enabled by an optimized workforce, intelligent
sales, strengthened operational controls, increased product and service innovation, and deepened customer care and
insight.
The results from those already on the journey to becoming a social business show:
• 90% of respondents report measurable business benefits from Web 2.0 tools, including better access to
knowledge, lower costs of doing business, and higher revenues (McKinsey Global Survey 2010)
• Standout organizations are 57% more likely to allow their people to use social and collaborative tools (IBM
CHRO Study 2010)

Why Social Business and Unified Communications are linked?
New social models are changing the way businesses operate but social interactions tend to be asynchronous. Unified
Communications makes it possible assemble the team, regardless of location and make a decision.

A social business becomes engaged, transparent and nimble by activating networks of people to apply relevant
content and expertise to improve and accelerate how work gets done. Unified communications (UC) is a critical
component of your strategy to become a social business because UC provides an immediate and cost-effective way to
take action across your extended organization. IBM Sametime software is IBM’s platform for unified communications
and collaboration. It provides a core set of synchronous (real-time) communication services that make it easier to find,

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reach and collaborate with colleagues, customers and business partners.

IBM Business Card is providing both Social Business
and leverage Sametime status and capabilities

Sametime software offers the following features:
• Rich presence helps you easily and quickly find the people you need through online status, availability,
automatic location awareness and available telephony status.
• Security-rich, enterprise class instant messaging can reduce phone and voice mail costs while providing an
unobtrusive way to engage with colleagues who are otherwise unavailable.
• Online meetings with audio and video conferencing help reduce travel and enable remote workers to engage
with their colleagues.
• Integrated Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and high-quality desktop video deliver a more interactive,
collaborative experience and lower telephony costs. Bandwidth management tools make rich media
collaboration feasible by constraining overall audio and video bandwidth in your network, leaving bandwidth
available for mission-critical applications.
• Community collaboration can save you hours by making it possible for you to find and interact with experts in
the organization you didn’t even know and keep in touch with customers, partners, family and friends.
• Mobile device support gives you access to people and information even when you are on the road.
• Out-of-the-box integration with IBM Lotus, IBM WebSphere and other IBM software as well as Microsoft
products quickly adds collaboration to the products people use most often, promoting adoption.
• Open application programming interfaces (APIs) and an extensible client provide communications capabilities
to users wherever they work, improving productivity.
• Optional one-number phone service, softphone and call management capabilities deliver next- generation
voice capabilities through your existing telephony infrastructure.
Sametime software delivers these services, and because Sametime software embraces open standards, it
also delivers services from hundreds of IBM Business Partners through a unified user experience. Moving
among text chats, voice and video calls, and online meetings is seamless to the user and driven by what is
most effective for the task at hand.

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IBM Sametime is bringing real-time interactions

Sametime software-based unified communication and collaboration solutions typically pay for themselves in less than
a year based on hard-cost savings alone. Our clients have been able to:
• Minimize travel costs for internal meetings and reduce travel for external meetings.
• Reduce or eliminate expensive monthly subscriptions to hosted web conferencing services.
• Slash their telephony costs by shifting calls to text, voice chats or VoIP phone calls through Sametime
software.
• Avoid exorbitant cell phone roaming and hotel access charges on international trips.
• Lower call center costs by chat enabling customer service sites.
• Save on infrastructure costs by opting for low-end Internet Protocol (IP) phones with Sametime software
instead of high-end devices.
• Postpone expensive PBX migrations.
• Lower maintenance and real estate costs by enabling staff to work from home.
• Reduce telephony costs for remote employees,(for example, eliminating second phone lines for home
offices).Lower audio conferencing costs through in-house, ad hoc conferencing.
• Eliminate the need to pay for third-party softphones and the connection fees associated with these
softphones.

Of course, the real power of unified communications is in its productivity gains. Human latency is the time we lose
waiting waiting as we identify others who can answer questions, waiting for email or voice mail to be returned, waiting
while teams get organized to tackle a project. Human latency leads to lost sales, unhappy customers and decisions
based on inaccurate or incomplete information. With Sametime software-based unified communication and
collaboration solutions, our clients have:
• Spent less time trying to find people who can answer questions and more time being productive.
• Lowered customer service and help-desk costs by more effectively resolving issues.
• Driven more sales by speeding approvals and answering customer questions faster.
• Speed project completion across dispersed teams.
• Provided better employee work-life balance through the ability to work virtually anywhere.
• Acquired better talent by removing location as a limiting factor.
• Evolved a more collaborative culture across teams around the world or on different floors of the same building.

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IBM Sametime integration supports both MS Outlook, MS Office and MS Sharepoint

Social software solutions are becoming a bigger part of the tool set for today's companies. A report from analyst IDC
states that worldwide revenue for the social platforms market was US$369.7 million in 2009, representing growth of
more than 55 percent. Gartner predicts that "by 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary
vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users."
According to an IBM survey, 98 percent of CEOs need to restructure the way their organizations work. Over
five hours is wasted per employee per week due to inefficient processes. Two hours is spent per employee
per day looking for the right information and expertise within an organization.

IBM Sametime is providing Social Business real-time interactions and accelerate the ROI.

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For companies using... Sametime software's built-in integration
IBM Lotus Notes and IBM • Online awareness and enterprise instant messaging for any Lotus Notes
Lotus Domino software- or browser-based Lotus Domino application.
• You can run the full IBM Sametime client within the Notes environment.
IBM Social Networking • Online presence awareness for Connections communities and blogs.
software (IBM Connections) • Sharing communities between Connections and Sametime clients.
Microsoft Office applications • Online presence and geographic location awareness as well as instant access to
the full range of Sametime capabilities directly from Microsoft Office.
• New integration with Microsoft Office 2010 supports the Office Ribbon model.
Microsoft® Outlook • Online presence and geographic location awareness as well as instant access to
the full range of Sametime capabilities directly from Microsoft Outlook in-boxes.
• Microsoft Office calendar users can schedule a Web conference, along with a
meeting, directly from their Outlook calendar.
Microsoft Sharepoint • Online presence and geographic location awareness as well as instant access to
the full range of Sametime capabilities directly from Microsoft® Sharepoint sites,
without any modifications to those sites.
IBM WebSphere Portal & IBM • Online presence awareness and enterprise instant messaging for Portal
Customer Experience Suite applications, which deliver a point of personalized interaction with applications,
content, processes and people.
Your application • IBM Sametime now offers a new zero-download Web client built on a new Web
2.0 toolkit that makes it easier for businesses to embed Sametime capabilities
into their applications and Web sites. Additionally, the zero-download Web client
makes it easy for external users to participate in meetings.
• IBM Sametime Unified Telephony REST API provides click-to-call and click-to-
conference semantics, allowing a call to be established between a registered
user and one or more IBM Sametime contacts or external phone numbers.

In the marketplace for more than 10 years, Sametime software is a mature, proven and highly scalable product with
deployments ranging from tens of users to more than 400,000 users. And with the recent releases of IBM Sametime
8.5 and IBM Sametime Unified Telephony software, IBM continues to push the pace of innovation in unified
communications.

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Why companies need to think about Unified
Communications & Collaboration?
Technology changes our traditional means of communications. A written communication can be an email, an instant
message, a voice message (perhaps translated from voice to text), a blog alert or a notification from an application or
other business system. Making calls is no longer only the domain of the telephone. Multiple devices can be used to
make calls, a desktop phone, a mobile phone, a PDA or your PC.

These types of advances in communications technology create opportunities for business innovation and improved
flexibility and responsiveness. Innovative approaches in business communications and collaboration directly address
today’s critical business challenges. Customers now have a unique opportunity to move from a disjointed
communications system to a state-of-the-art, unified, collaborative environment enabling new business processes with
SOA based applications [Communications Enables Business Processes and Applications]

Instant Messaging VoIP

Web 2.0 SIP

Presence
SOA

Conferencing
 Web
 Audio
 Video
WiMax High speed Broadband Directory Services

Business is global, interdependent, virtual and matrixed. They operate with dispersed teams. Reporting lines do not
logically follow the formal organizational model. Centers of competence are located around the globe supporting the
objectives of the entire corporation. People work in (virtual) teams to support clients. Existing tools and capabilities
are being used in new ways. Communication can be a key barrier or an enabler. Converged networks allow
companies to implement innovative ways to focus on communications as an enabling tool.

Innovation is great, but it also creates many questions. How fast can your business model shift to adapt to client
requirements? How can you stay competitive in an ever changing environment? Does your voice and data network
keep-up with your end user requirements? Your clients and end users want to access data and talk about it together
with someone else. Can you do that with a seamless end-to-end capability? Do you have the need.....?

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Communications Enables Business Processes & Applications
Technology is available today that can help create efficient and effective business processes. Legacy systems need
to be integrated with the new environment. Converged communications assumes combining voice and data networks.

The objective of Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) therefore is to 'communications enable'
applications and business processes by integrating advanced communication capabilities directly in the software that
people use for their day-to-day tasks.

End-user devices

Handheld devices
Desk phones with with voice, data, PCs or laptops with
voice, data, presence, presence and voice, data, presence,
messaging and video messaging messaging and video

Communication tools E-mail and Collaboration tools Information access
personal information
 IP Telephony management  Presence  Directory lookup
 Fixed/mobile  E-mail  Instant messaging  Information portal
convergence  Contacts  Audio conferencing  Enterprise
 Unified Messaging  Team rooms applications
 Calendaring
 Video telephony  Scheduling  Discussion forums  Online learning
 To-do lists  Wikis and blogs  Voice-driven
directory/
 Memo pad  Web conferencing
information lookup
 Video conferencing

Collaboration applications available for the users

Here are two real world examples

First, an IBM technical support representative recently received an urgent support call from an IBM customer in Korea.
The customer didn’t speak English and our support rep didn’t speak Korean. But he has options:
• using a Sametime plug-in that instantly translates English into Korean and vice-versa allowed him to provide a
basic initial response;
• using 'Skill Tap' – a Sametime feature – he sent a realtime request for help to an expert community. A bilingual IBM
employee responded and agreed to join a call and translate — helping to solve the customer’s problem.

Second, imagine the following not unusual situation; a report is due in two hours. You need clarification on an issue
too complicated to work out over Instant Messaging or email. With IBM Sametime you check your contact list to see
who is available to help. You can see instantly who is online, available and not on the phone. You click to start a voice
call using your integrated softphone. You do not know it but the colleague your are trying to reach is traveling. Due to
the one number service the call is automatically routed to the mobile phone. Contact is made and you did not even
have to know where the person is or what number to use in order to establish contact.

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The business value of implementing a UC² strategy -
the analyst view.
In this section we put the spotlight on some pertinent research by analysts, marketing and other commentators. We
explore findings from Forrester, Aberdeen Group and Siemens – the latter of course is not a market analyst company
but they sponsored a very valuable market study.

In general the analysts seem to agree that the potential for cost reduction in converged networks arises from the
elimination of unnecessary infrastructure duplication. Although some redundancy is desirable in order to meet
reliability objectives there are unjustifiable costs associated with duplicate equipment for separate data, voice, and
video networks, duplicate management for these networks, duplicate sets of support personnel, and duplicate facilities
costs (for example, cabling, floor space or cooling).

But there are more gains to be realised. This is not only about infrastructure costs. The analysts clearly widen the
scope to other areas such as collaboration, end-user satisfaction and general communications benefits. This goes
back directly to points we raised concerning employee effectiveness and the positive effect UC² has on internal and
external collaboration.

In summary the analyst community points us to following benefit categories:

• Reduction in overall operations cost.
• Improved, more efficient company-wide communication.
• Much improved end-user and client satisfaction.
• Overall improved access to information.
• Improved competitive position.
• Reduced cost of travel

Many people will be skeptical when analysts or service companies predict savings of X amount of Euro's. It's not so
much that the numbers are not true, it's trying to make them specific to your company that is the issue.

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As we will discover below and in our case study in the next chapter the numbers we quote are based in reality. We
also recognize that no matter what we say here, every customer case is different and customers will only know what
their ROI potential is when they plug-in their own numbers in the ROI calculator. One thing people tend to agree on –
you can’t afford to do nothing.

“Measuring the Pain: What is Fragmented Communications Costing Your Enterprise?” -
Siemens study
This Siemens sponsored study was the largest-ever survey of enterprise and contact center employees and therefore
worth calling out here. It reveals the silent but staggering costs of fragmented communications

Enterprises with 1000 employees could be losing up to 13M Dollars per year. Total lost and avoidable expense can
range from $6K per person per year for a company with 500 employees to $12K per person per year for a company
with 1,000 employees.

The study tells us how this breaks out:
• Waiting for information is expensive; the study estimates delays of 5.3 hours per week at an average annual cost of
over $9000 per user.
• The study counts approximately 11 days p/year of unnecessary or avoidable business travel and an annual waste
of at least $3400 per person to “synchronize teams”.
• 75% of companies incurred additional communication costs of +/- $1488/Year. These are additional expenses on
top of typical travel expenses.

Many companies are increasing their remote worker headcounts who on average spend 10% of their time working
from remote locations. Lack of effective communications can mean additional and often unmeasured financial side
effects.

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The Total Economic Impact - Forrester
Forrester takes a similar angle in their October 2007 study. They work on quantitative savings but they also identify
additional benefits that deal with telephony savings, training and a travel expense and the important aspects of
attracting new employees.

The new internet generations are entering the workforce. They expect to be able to use modern communications
technologies such as chat, video and audio conferencing, team and community spaces as well as expertise networks.
These are capabilities they have been using online for years.

Forrester also looks at customer services because of the clear relationship between rapid and quality responses and
customer satisfaction, company image and revenue.

Quantifiable ROI – Aberdeen Group
The Aberdeen Group study of September 2007 further validates that their ‘best in class companies’ can derive
concrete savings from adopting UC technologies - 33% of these companies report increasing ROI and almost 40%
report increasing user satisfaction. Furthermore, between 17 and 29% of companies report that UC² has increased
revenue.

Performance Increases from Adoption of Unified Communications2

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ROI examples from customers using IBM Sametime
To validate the findings from the analyst community we delve into IBM's rich customer base. We can quote you many
examples – here is a selection of the most pertinent ones as they illustrate cost savings and ROI examples in the
areas we identified before.

An electronics manufacturer saved $600K in airfare and travel costs and a grocery chain saved $520K on training
using online facilities instead of travel.

We worked with a large insurance company and they calculated savings of $650K due to the reduction in phone
calls for 35,000 employees using instant messaging. They expect this to increase with the softphone capabilities in
Sametime. In addition they realized savings of $300K anually by switching from hosted webconferencing to Sametime
webconferencing allowing them to better control costs and usage.

A global Retailer was able to add $750K/year to margins by reducing supply and order fulfillment disruptions.
Traditional communications alone (phone and email) weren’t fast enough to help them streamline these time critical
business processes.

A large vehicle leasing company in the world created an internal social networking platform called LinkedPeople. The
company also implemented IBM Sametime software for instant, real-time collaboration and communication. Cost
savings on reduced travel alone are able to pay for the entire solution, including licenses, implementation and
maintenance.
When it comes to end user productivity, the ability to capture and share knowledge and to identify other employees
with certain areas of expertise, who could then be contacted in real time for consultation on a wide range of topics is
one of main factor for ROI in terms of sharing. This project has been capable to redefine existing business processes,
optimizing the productivity of internal employees, which enabled the organization to do more business with the
same number of people.

A biotech company in the US reported customer satisfaction gains by adding enhanced communications to their
applications. They needed a better way to stay in touch with their manufacturing plants and customers who are
located all over the world. For years the company had been relying on e-mail to communicate with its international
customers as well as with its Korea-based manufacturing plant, but because of the large time difference,
communication often took days to complete, straining the company's relationships and delaying ongoing projects Not
only has the solution improved their ability to communicate and collaborate internally, it has improved the company's
ability to serve its customers efficiently. The IBM Sametime software integrates flawlessly into the client's Lotus
Notes environment, which has allowed employees to leverage the software immediately and reap the benefits of real-
time communication. And because employees can chat with customers, partners and colleagues around the world, the
solution has reduced their overall dependence on e-mail while improving communication.

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Two examples in the automotive sector provide further insight. By using Sametime integrated into Portals a company
saw significant reductions in development cycles. They saved costs by centralizing information and reducing
travel costs for design meetings. Development teams could be more responsive and this in turn increased speed-to-
production of new vehicle models.

In Greece our Services teams 'communications enabled' a web-based dealer network application for the national
distributor representing a large Japanese car manufacturer. Several interesting ROI elements have been measured,
such as optimization of business processes, one of the ROI categories we identified in this paper:

• 10% to 20% reduction in inventory levels at Dealer stockrooms
• 30% faster fulfillment time on car orders (from 11 to 7 days)
• 60% faster fulfillment time on spare parts orders (from 3 days to 1 day)
• 90% reduction in rejected warranty claims by the manufacturer
• 60% reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) for IT
• 69% reduction in dealers’ IT costs
• Total elimination of false warranty claims

Another US-based insurance company developed an easy-access communication system that allows agents to
conduct most transactions via the Web. They leveraged the latest Lotus Notes and Sametime software, enabling
agents to log in and do everything from viewing current policies and accessing rates to engaging in instant chats with
underwriters about specific policies. Lotus Sametime opened communication channels for sales people to
immediately contact underwriters. An agent sees the underwriter's name on a policy and clicks on that name to begin
a chat. Both parties have access to the same policy via a link. As a result the company and its representatives can cut
through clutter and delays to respond to customer needs by providing instant quotes. The company has dynamically
increased the exchange of information and ideas, bonding a scattered workforce via the Web. From an ROI
perspective they reported the following results:
• Cut policy turnaround time from weeks to a matter of days
• 50% reduction in the number of internal phone calls
• 40% less people needed for the same volume of business

Finally, a large outsourcing company was able to increase the productivity of its Customer Service Help Desk by
20% over 2 years. Desk analysts can now efficiently tap expertise of thousands of experts worldwide. Quick
communication on outages or other situations affecting customers further streamline their performance.

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ROI Elements – two case studies
Asking ‘What is the ROI on Social UC’ is a valid question but so broad that it needs further precision. We prefer to
answer it by breaking it down into measurable ROI elements, some or all of which can be applied to your business.

We will be reviewing two case studies – 'CarParts', a real automotive company (actual company name withheld on
request) and IBM’s own internal usage experience.

‘CarParts’ - the Workplace for Change

This is a real-life example of a medium sized German automotive parts company. In this paper we will call them
CarParts. The company has 5500 employees in 19 countries, revenues of approximately 2500M Euro and they have
three main product lines across heating and exhaust systems. The company spends roughly 70M Euro annually on
R&D.

We have performed an extensive ROI analysis with the CarParts teams. Below we focus on those business categories
which the team has identified as having delivered the best Return On Investment.

The CarParts team embarked on an Unified Communications project called ‘Workplace for Change'.

CarParts’ Collaboration Opportunity…
From Personal Productivity to an Integrated Collaborative
Workplace

Dynamic, Integrated
Collaborative
Workplace

• Integrated Collaboration Suite of tools
(easy to access, easy to use, easy to administer)
• Lowers your TCO with a global
Business Value

standardized platform
• Extend your collaboration reach across
the enterprise with employees, suppliers,
and customers
Team Productivity • Collaboration pervasiveness across your
mobile workforce with Device-aware
toolset

Personal Productivity

Time

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As you can see from the picture CarParts has moved from a personal productivity model to an integrated collaborative
workspace. The impact on their business was profound.

They had set themselves the following broad targets with 'Workplace for Change':

1. Move users toward a self-service model of information access and delivery
2. Decrease business costs and improve operational efficiency
3. Share information and ideas with customers, suppliers and partners
4. Speed up and improve the organization's decision-making capabilities
5. Align and track more closely with corporate strategy and objectives
6. Manage specific operational processes in a more timely fashion
7. Drive innovation, competitive advantage and decentralized decision making throughout the organization

CarParts ‘Workplace for change’ project had to deliver real benefits to the organization and change the culture
towards collaboration. You can see that various UC elements were part of the project, such as Mobile Workforce and
Universal Connectivity. The expectation from UC technologies was to greatly enhance the Knowledge Sharing
aspects. Instant messaging, expertise location, presence awareness, emeetings and collaborative spaces were
technologies that needed to be widely deployed.

When we work with customers we present them with our ROI value tree. We simply try and separate out the Benefits
versus the Cost of a Unified Communications project. We also tend to work with an investment comparison over a 3
year time frame. In our method we work with customers to jointly identify benefits and we will then be able to attach
specific action items to these.

Potential Benefit Areas / Value Propositions

Reduce long-
Reduce long-
long-  Reduce telecom costs incurred handling Level 2 Support
distance telecom
distance telecom calls
costs
costs

Cost Reduction
Cost Reduction Reduce travel and
Reduce travel and  Reduce travel and expenses for quarterly meetings in
expenses for
expenses for Purchasing Group
quarterly meeting
quarterly meeting

BENEFITS
BENEFITS Reduce Labor
Reduce Labor  Increase problem-resolution effectiveness by leveraging
costs in NA
costs in NA real-time communications to diagnose manufacturing
Manufacturing
Manufacturing issues

Support heavy
Support heavy  Improve process efficiencies during Accounting Close
duty cyclical work
duty cyclical work Period
Employee
Employee loads
loads
Productivity
Productivity
Improve
Improve  Increase problem-resolution effectiveness by leveraging
effectiveness of
effectiveness of real-time communications to diagnose manufacturing
Sales Reps
Sales Reps issues
ROI

Improve
Improve  Eliminate physical face-to-face quarterly Purchasing
effectiveness of
effectiveness of Meeting thereby making the Purchasing reps more
Purchasing staff
Purchasing staff productive

Improve
Improve  Increase reach and coordination within IT department by
effectiveness of
effectiveness of utilizing full collaboration suite
IT Staff
IT Staff
Hardware

Software
TCO
Implementation
Services

Maintenance

Behind this value tree is a spreadsheet which we will explore a little further below. Each business benefit area has to
be coupled with a financial benefit. If one adds these up an overall picture emerges, like the one in the table on the
next page.

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The numbers above are fictitious but they are an example of the custom ROI calculation we performed for CarParts.
We have some real numbers to show you in conclusion of this case study. We have been able to find financial benefits
in each of the following categories:

1. Sales effectiveness
2. Employee productivity
3. Customer service
4. Telephone & Webconferencing
5. Travel

Below we will expand on categories one to four. Reducing travel costs speaks for itself and we will have a more
detailed analysis of this category in the IBM case study.

• Increase sales
Benefits in this area of the business refer to opportunities to increase sales by making sales efforts more effective.
This includes better coordination across global accounts, sharing of best practices, better reusability of key sales
assets and dynamic collaboration of the 'best qualified resources' for a specific sales opportunity. The stated goal
was to increase sales transactions to between 50 and 200 per week.

• Improve employee productivity
These benefits refer to time savings opportunities associated with enhanced communication and collaboration
capabilities, including identifying and contacting people and expertise, coordinating teams and project
communities. CarParts thinks they could reach a 25% increase in productivity with better technology and more
effective processes. Between 70-90% of activities involve seeking help and improving the speed of
communication.

• Reduce telephone and webconferencing cost
Though strictly speaking more a cost of ownership (TCO) than a ROI argument, reducing telephone usage as a
direct result of deploying unified communication and collaboration technologies is probably the easiest benefit to
calculate. That, and reduced travel by using web conferencing. Experience bears out that increased IM usage will
reduce phone calls. VOIP will reduce telecommunications costs. How much, depends on your business.

eMeetings can be hosted by a service provider or IBM Sametime software can be acquired to host it on-premise.
Many companies end up with a hybrid model. Hosting is not always the most cost effective model. Usage patterns
are difficult to predict and licensing models vary widely. Having an onsite solution often means not only better
technical control (security) but also better financial control over the conferencing solutions.

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• Reduce cost of customer service and help desk support
CarParts saved 53K Euro in their Call Center by using Sametime and consequently reducing escalation time with
5min per call.

Help desks and customer contact centers are areas of the business where communication technologies can have a
real impact. CarParts has 100 support professionals. They spend 80% of their time troubleshooting, talking to
SME‘s etc. If the time-to-resolution per customer is reduced, more customers can be assisted, wait times are down
and customer satisfaction will go up. We have a concrete cost savings example in our Chapter 7 dealing with
Contact Center ROI.

CarParts ROI Summary
CarParts has benefitted tremendously from their ‘WorkPlace for Change’ initiative. For a total investment of roughly
175.000 Euro CarParts realized a cost saving over 3 years of roughly 1.6M Euro.

We trust that this example has given you a few ideas of where the savings originate. This was not a theoretical
exercise but we have been able to share with your the results of an ROI initiative with a real company deploying real
solutions in the real world.

IBM, the Sametime ROI story (from 2008 figures)

Let us now turn to IBM itself to show how our own calculations affect the ROI story. IBM's CIO office leads the
deployment of IBM's internal software. In an internal report about the Sametime deployment the CIO Office clearly
outlines their goals which support the story we started in this paper:

Sametime is a key application that the IBM corporation depends on to provide real-time collaboration services
to employees. In addition, IBM's internal deployment of Sametime allows collaboration with external
customers. (...) These capabilities directly support IBM CIO strategy including the need to reduce the
dependancy on e-mail, enable faster decision making, reducing costs including business travel and
telecommunication costs and supporting the need to collaborate with external customers.

With roughly 400,000 employees world-wide in 64 countries IBM conducts business in 170 countries. There are
roughly 2,041 IBM locations and 40% of IBM employees are mobile. This section will demonstrate how the internal
deployment of the Sametime product family is assisting IBM with it's ROI and cost reduction story.

Instant Messaging and eMeetings at IBM – the numbers.
There are approximately 400,000 Sametime users in IBM of which 200,000 are concurrent users. We count about 10
million chat messages per day with 1.3 million participants. This user community creates roughly 190,000 emeetings.

Our IT infrastructure currently consists of the Sametime client, the Notes client with integrated Instant Messaging,
Sametime Mobile and a Sametime Web Conferencing Enterprise Meeting Server. We run a Sametime server
infrastructure in a so-called ‘run once’ world-wide deployment (5 Sametime Community Servers, 10 Multiplexor
Servers to handle end-user connections). There is an active internal developer community to create Sametime Plug-
ins. Plug-ins support innovation and they are developed and posted internally on a “plug-in factory” website.

We provide our users with a suite of “e-meeting” services; webcasts, audio/video conferences and Sametime hosted
webconferencing. Sametime is used everywhere within IBM, but we also support external communities with customers
and business partners.

Note again that we are running this infrastructure essentially on 5 Sametime servers! This is a testament to
Sametime's scalability and enterprise readiness.

Page 20


Sametime @ IBM: Business Value Realized (from 2008 figures)
We estimate savings of US $16.5 million per year in reduced phone costs due to the use of instant messaging.
Several cost avoidance factors contribute to these results:
• Reduced phone and pager usage
• Reduced e-mail usage
• Quick access to expertise
• Support mobile workers
• Back-channel to speed-up time-to-resolution

The table below provides you with an insight on how we calculated the 16.7M annual savings in reduced phone costs:
Number of self-registered users 380,000
Maximum concurrent users 200,000
Number of unique users per day 275,000
Number of messages per day 5,000,000
Average number of messages per user per day 18
Number of unique users per day 275,000
Number of times IM used p/day instead of phone 5

Number of minutes per call 2.5
Phone rate $0.020
Average savings per day $68,750
Average savings per month $1,375,000
(20 business days per month).
Average savings per year $16,500,000

Estimated travel savings due to the use of Webconferencing amount to US $97M p/year. We noted the following cost
avoidance factors as the main contributors to these results:
• Reduced travel
• Support of mobile workers
• Back-channel
• Productivity enhancements

This table shows in more detail how IBM can avoid +/- $8M per month in travel costs:
Number of meetings 216,700
Number of participants 1,350,000
Average participants per meeting 6
Percent of meetings requiring people to travel 15%
Percent of people, per meeting, that would travel 50%

Price of travel per person $1,000
Number of meetings requiring travel 32,505
Number of people traveling to meetings 97,515
Travel savings per year $97,515,000
Travel savings per month $8,126,250

Update in 2011:
Usage of Sametime is increasing. More than 50M message per day

Page 21


Green Computing ROI
IBM is committed to environmental leadership in all of its business activities. Therefore, this paper would not be
complete if we did not address Green Computing in particular because there is an ROI angle to the story.

A case can be made that Unified Communications can result in savings in travel, carbon footprint and paper. That
contributes to ROI. Having said that, we do see Green Computing in a broader spectrum. There are aspects that
extend well beyond collaboration software as such and therefore also beyond the scope of this paper. Look online for
more information. There is a good Wikipedia section on Green Computing;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_computing

On Sept 17, 2008, Frost & Sullivan presented IBM with its 2008 Business Software and
Communications Applications Green Excellence of the Year Award. Frost & Sullivan recognized
IBM's strong commitment to help its customers accomplish a number of goals including becoming
more cost-efficient, more eco-friendly and even more competitive. As you can see, more ROI
Elements.

IBM has been active in promoting programs that reduce the commute to work for its employees. Key contributors to
this effort are IBM’s two flexible work programs:
• Work-at-home: Enables many employees to work from a home office
• Mobile employees: Enables many other employees to work from home a designated number of days each
week
In 2010, more than 122,000 employees (29 percent) globally participated in one of these two programs, which not only
helps employees balance their work and personal responsibilities, but also benefits the environment. In the U.S.
alone, IBM’s work-at-home program conserved approximately 6.2 million gallons of fuel and avoided more than 48,000
metric tons of CO2 emissions in 2010.

In 2010, IBM expanded the use of collaboration tools, both internally and externally, to reduce our impact on the
environment. As a company, we conducted more than 790,000 online meetings and exchanged more than 10 billion
instant messages. Collaborating in this fashion is fundamental to IBM and has allowed us to save on travel costs and
impacts, boost productivity by connecting our global workforce 24/7, and avoid CO2 emissions. We also have
increased our use of video conferencing to help reduce the need for travel and improve team interactions. In addition
to more than 400 video-equipped IBM rooms globally, we completed work on an IBM Sametime® desktop video pilot
to extend video capability to employees’ desktops.

Page 22


Customer Contact Center ROI
Contact Centers are an area of business where unified communications can have a immediate effect on ROI.

Instant messaging facilitates direct and time efficient customer contact. A quick exchange via IM can prevent a lengthy
phone call and can reduce call volume. Expert lists can be easily added to a contact center application. They provide
the CSR with a list of experts and a view on their availability (on/offline, on/off the phone, in meeting or available).
Presence awareness can help a CSR connect to an available person instantly thus preventing time consuming calling
around to find someone.

The IBM Customer Service Center Help Desk uses Lotus Sametime to enable help desk analysts to tap the technical
expertise of thousands of experts worldwide, to keep analysts appraised of current outages or other situations
affecting customers and to manage this globally dispersed, highly skilled workforce. "We have seen our productivity
numbers increase up to 20% over the last two years" Tanya Liblik, Service Delivery Manager, IBM Global Services
Toronto.

In a call center seconds count. Finding an expert quickly can enhance the case resolution rates and consequently
customer satisfaction.

Online customer self-service can reduce operational costs by deflecting calls to enhanced FAQ's on the web for
example*. Blogs can provide means for customers to comment on products and services plus they are a great source
of customer information for the marketing department. Personalized webspaces can provide customers with their own
microsites thereby increasing customer intimacy and loyalty.

Page 23


The ROI categories that are impacted by these technologies are multiple but they can reduce costs (shorter calls or
fewer calls) and increase revenue (an increase in customer satisfaction increases return purchases).

To illustrate this section we can quote a concrete example from our CarParts company referenced before. Using
Sametime in their call center reduced escalation time with 5min per call which translated into a 53K Euro saving. The
contact center handles 200.000 calls per year. 10% or 20.000 calls need some form of escalation to an expert. A CSR
costs on average 32E p/hour. The cost savings are easily calculated: (20.000 calls x 5min) / (60 minutes x 32 E).

Web interactions (1$ per email) are cheaper than phone calls (10$ per call), SSPA (Service & Support Professionals Association)

Genesys UC Connect and IBM Lotus Sametime

To demonstrate the effect of adding Sametime to a call center application further we have worked with Genesys, an
Alcatel-Lucent company, on a joint contact center approach. Genesys UC Connect improves customer service quality
and the productivity of agents and experts by facilitating the integration of Genesys with Lotus Sametime unified
communications (UC). Combining Genesys intelligent interaction management and routing with Lotus Sametime
expands the labor pool beyond the contact center to Sametime-provisioned workers throughout the entire enterprise.

There are a number of challenges;
• How do you train contact center agents (avg. 20–50 %
annual turnover rate) to accumulate and articulate the
knowledge of an entire organization?
• How can you staff your customer service operation to handle
unexpected increases in customer calls/contact volume while
keeping labor costs down?

The Genesys UC Connect solution integrates with Sametime to achieve
this expansion of customer service resources by using the Sametime
client on back office and branch office desktops.

Reducing total cost of ownership
Intelligent routing of calls to a broader range of agents or employees
helps to achieve better first-call resolution rates, which leads to higher
customer loyalty and allows revenue objectives to be met. Lotus
Sametime becomes the portal by which your entire organization can collaborate to efficiently serve customers. There
are three key ways that Genesys UC Connect and Sametime can help improve your customer service:

1. Front and back office integration - Training agents to be experts is time-consuming and expensive. But by
including back office resources in the customer service operation, you can reduce costs, dramatically shorten
call times, and increase first contact resolution because customers won’t be left on hold by agents who take up
valuable time while pouring over material in the knowledge base.

2. Support of branch offices and retail outlets - Many businesses have trained customer service employees at
locations where they can interact face-to-face with customers. The peak busy periods for these employees is
different than those within the contact center. By linking UC to your customer service operation, a very dynamic
and widely dispersed customer care force becomes available to the remote customer service operation.

3. Empowering field sales - The intelligent handling of accounts and leads can have an immediate impact on the
bottom line of any business. By linking lead generation in contact centers to sales resources outside the contact
center, you can use specific product or service knowledge, or transfer customer contacts seamlessly to those in
the field.

Page 24


Unified communications and the contact center—the promise and the problem
Genesys UC Connect integrates with Lotus Sametime to allow knowledge workers from diverse back office
departments to be melded directly into the contact center workflow on a part-time basis without formally becoming
customer service agents. This allows for a direct connection between the customer and the enterprise UC user,
providing live customer service even when traffic spikes cause contact center resources to be overwhelmed.

Today agents may use
Sametime to view when experts
are available on their agent
desktop, and click to initiate a
voice or IM session. However,
this method can unintentionally
cause excessive interruptions
for the enterprise UC user,
leading to frustration and lost
productivity. Genesys UC
Connect incorporates a variety
of best practices to guard
against this danger.

Using process to protect your
most valuable resources
Genesys UC Connect
“subscribes” to presence
provided by Sametime to
determine the availability or
location of experts and back
office and branch office
workers. Rather than displaying available enterprise resources to contact center agents by name, Genesys software
abstracts these resources’ identities into skill sets. This prevents agents from becoming dependent on particular
experts. Genesys routing can then forward inquiries, along with pertinent “attached data/call context,” to available
experts based on business rules that include the dynamically updated location of the expert. The use of routing logic
ensures that inclusion of highly paid information workers into the customer service operation is both effective and
sustainable.

Finally, Genesys UC Connect provides standard Genesys reporting on all interactions, even those that leave the
contact center entirely and are fielded solely by IBM Sametime users. Reporting, case tracking and the ability to
forward calls back into the contact center mean that back and branch office workers can accept full transfers from
agents, rather than requiring an agent to stay on the line. This level of functionality also allows interactions to be
forwarded to IBM Sametime users outside the contact center directly from the interactive voice response, rather than
from agents alone. Through this integration, Genesys UC Connect is the only solution that uses your Lotus Sametime
investment to dynamically expand your customer service resource pool to respond to unanticipated or seasonal traffic
spikes without having to hire additional personnel or outsourcers.

Page 25


Video Communications ROI
The most obvious cost benefit of video can be found in the avoidance of travel. It does not seem too far fetched to
suggest that a typical company could replace at least 25% of meetings that need travel with videoconferencing if they
deploy good quality systems. The Climate Group - 20 companies that form part of a global environmental initiative -
estimated in 2008 that up to 20 percent of business travel worldwide could be prevented by web conference and
videoconferencing technology !

Adding video to applications can be the start of a new way of working. Video has also sparked entirely new markets.

In July 2009, Polycom completed a Wainhouse Research study entitled “Benchmarking the Benefits of
Videoconferencing Deployments”.
The study, based on survey responses of over 300 companies, looked at Return on Investment (ROI) figures and cost
savings due to video conferencing in a number of Enterprise industries including financial, manufacturing, high
technology, energy, retail, hospitality and transportation.
The survey focused on six key savings areas:
• Travel – Use of video conferencing as a travel alternative
• Time to Market – Video conferencing used to bring products to market sooner
• Downtime – Video conferencing as a tool for enhancing maintenance and repair processes
• Training – Video conferencing used in distance learning environments
• Recruiting – Video conferencing used to reduce interview and recruitment cycles
• Sales – Video conferencing used to save on sales-related costs

The Results overall Enterprises and SMBs see significant savings by using video conferencing:
• Save 30% on travel costs
• Reduce time-to-market by 24%
• Reduce downtime by 27%
• Save 25% on training
• Shrink recruitment times by 19%
• Reduce sales-related costs by 24%

In the August 2009 report, Enterprise Video Collaboration, Aberdeen studied the behaviors and business performance
of over 140 respondents using video. In studying their results, the amalgam of video collaboration capabilities into a
unified communications (UC) environment was a key step for gaining value and measuring hard ROI metrics from a
video solution.

Page 26


Percentage of employees using video over the last 12 months

First, when Aberdeen compared companies that had leveraged video into unified communications compared to those
that used video as a stand-alone solution, we found that unified communications led to more than a two-fold increase
in the percentage of employees using video over the last 12 months.

For companies using stand-alone solutions, 27% of employees had used video in the last 12 months compared to
64% of employees in companies that included the ease of access associated with embedding video capabilities into
an enterprise or business communications solution.

This business value was reflected in the fact that organizations with UC-based video capabilities were also more likely
to have equated their video solution with a solid return on investment. The only companies that were able to
demonstrate an annual ROI of over 200% per year were those that had already integrated video into their UC solution.

VIDEO is ready for business
Many things have changed in the video domain. Customers are moving from older ISDN-based and difficult to use
room systems with limited user acceptance to a 'one click to videoconference' paradigm made possible by products
like IBM Sametime.

We typically discern three classes of video capability:
• Desktop video : point to point (user to user), online meetings, webcasts
• Conference room video : large screens in meetings rooms
• Telepresence solutions : customized, dedicated video rooms, immersive, life-like

Video is bringing additional ROI to Unified Communications project as first an accelerator to the adoption, for example
when the objective is to stop and decrease travel expense, but also in many cases to open and reuse an existing
Video infrastructure and devices.

Feedback from one of a significant Sametime deployment in France demonstrate the complementarity of IM, Web
Meetings and Video communications. Results after 6 months (from a global leader in healthy foods)
• Increase Sametime usage up to 10.4 millions IM per months
• Video PC & Video Room are now a New Communication way
• This project has impacted our way of working and our travelling Costs

The following picture illustrates the evolution of Video usage across Video devices and PC:

Page 27


BYOD is changing the game
CIOs are implementing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategies to increase employee mobility, responsiveness and
productivity, while lowering cost. Tablets are bringing new interface to end user to simplify the Video experience and
also to benefit of the Video capabilities of such devices. In 2011, both Polycom and Radvision successfully deliver to
the market outstanding applications for Apple iPad and Android devices:
In a recent study, Nemertes Research reported that 86 percent of enterprises report an increase in the number of
telecommuters. Additionally, while IT budgets remain flat or increase only marginally, more than 43 percent of
organizations report a double-digit increase in mobility budgets.
“Mobility is a key consideration for any unified communications strategy, and the demand for mobile video is rapidly
growing as well,” said Irwin Lazar, vice president and service director at Nemertes.” IT buyers continually cite
interoperability as their primary challenge in delivering an integrated voice, video, and content solution.
“SCOPIA Mobile takes advantage of the extensive video expertise we have developed over many years and extends it
to personal devices, which are becoming an increasingly important component of any enterprise’s communications
strategy,” said Roberto Giamagli, general manager for RADVISION’s video business unit. “We’re delighted to deliver
this innovative, fully interoperable and user-friendly application to iOS and other platforms, allowing our customers to
take advantage of the ‘bring your own device’ phenomenon and participate in effective video meetings regardless of
their location.”

Page 28


Bring your own Device (ByoD) is not new. For example FORD began in 2007 such a program. Ford’s motivation to
look into BYOD as a reaction to two trends: Consumerization of IT, as well as the new habits of 20-something
Millennial employees. To investigate BYOD, Ford created a cross-functional team consisting of managers from the IT,
legal, HR, accounting and other departments.
When it comes to Video communications, using tablets is bringing many advantages:
• Free yourself from the office and conference room with the ability to meet anywhere.
• Stay connected with people and content with a single communication stream from your
tablet.
• Eliminate barriers to productivity and open new opportunities for immersive teamwork.
• Take charge of your work/life balance by taking video conferencing with you wherever you go.

Page 29


What about real ROI?
Video helps bring together people and teams situated anywhere across the globe—or across town—helping to drive
productivity through greater, more efficient collaboration. So goes the general wisdom....but what about real ROI?
Last year Eric Krapf, editor of nojitter.com, published a useful table on his blog.

Comparing the costs of a 1-hour face-to-face meeting 560 miles away (Boston - Philadelphia) with a 1-hour
video conference:

Peter Brockmann (Brockmann & Company) quotes from his study of 350 business users of videoconferencing. This
study shows the impact of video on business performance. As expected this lines-up nicely with the ROI-Elements
discussed in this paper:

◦ 20% higher customer satisfaction
◦ 72% higher employee satisfaction
◦ 85% more revenue per employee
◦ 20% more market share

There are many more examples like this. Whether you believe the precise numbers or not the trend is unmistakable.

Page 30


Desktop Video ROI from IBM
Why would you consider providing Desktop Video to your employees? Is Desktop Video a viable strategy? Since
2007 IBM's CIO office has conducted extensive tests with Desktop Video. Experiences from this IBM study are
interesting.

We implemented Desktop Video in the Software Group's
development organization of 550 employees from 14
countries who represented 30 development teams. The
project objective was to quantify how desktop video
enhances collaboration and increases productivity for
development teams.
Overall, 83% of respondents believe that video has a
positive impact on both the productivity of meetings and
on relationship management. 68% of respondents also
believe that video has a positive impact on Travel Expense
reductions. In addition, for effectiveness in increasing 2-
way interaction, gaining clarity on complex questions and
reducing cross-cultural language differences most of the
response was positive as well.

Product  68% of users confirmed desktop video improved quality of deliverables
Improvements
Team Productivity  73% of users said it impacted the on timeliness of decisions
 77% of dispersed users said it improved meeting productivity

On-going benefits Assisted trust building which improved the overall working relationships and interactions
 64% of users said it increased the effectiveness of two-way interactions
 84% said it improved relationship management
 77% said impacted morale positively

Page 31


Sametime Unified Telephony ROI
In June 2009 we introduced an exciting new product as part of the IBM Sametime family; Lotus Sametime Unified
Telephony (SUT). SUT turns your PC into an easy to use softphone without the complexity of expensive deskphones.
In addition it offers intelligent call routing, one number service to multiple devices and it can integrate with multiple IP &
TDM PBX"s so that you can gain the power of UC today without replacing your telephony infrastructure. SUT turns
your telephone into an extension of your Sametime contact list

SUT customers can look forward to savings in seven
categories:

1. Phone hardware
2. Ad-hoc audioconferencing
3. Improvements in productivity
4. Improvements in call accuracy
5. Reduced telephony costs for mobile and/or remote
workers
6. PBX migration or integration
7. Consolidation of Softphone vendors

In an August 2008 report Gartner observed that 75% of companies that are buying expensive IP phones are spending
150 dollars per employee more than they need to. If you have a PC, you can use it as a phone. This opens up
possibilities. Do you really need these expensive phones on each and every desk? What about utilizing less
expensive deskphones with SUT for sophisticated call management. Or using SUT's softphone in place of any
deskphone? The savings here can add up fast. Some of these new IP phones can cost hundreds of Euros/Dollars per
employee.

To understand the economic impact Sametime and Sametime Unified Telephony are having on organizations,
Wainhouse Research interviewed organizations who are deploying these solutions. Companies range in size from a
few hundred users to over a hundred thousand users. Most of these organizations had previously deployed Sametime
and were adding Sametime Unified Telephony. One began with IBM Connections, IBM’s business-focused social
networking software, and then added both Sametime and Sametime Unified Telephony simultaneously. Based on
these interviews, Wainhouse Research created a composite company of 35,000 knowledge workers in order to
perform a 360° analysis of the economic impact Sametime and Sametime Unified Telephony can have on a large
organization.
Six organizations that use Sametime and Sametime Unified Telephony (SUT) were interviewed for this study including:
1. Global engineering, procurement, construction and project management company with over 42,000
employees.
2. Global building materials company with offices in 50 countries and 46,500 employees.
3. The military for a Scandinavian country.
4. Regional insurance company based in the United States.
5. Global IT and business consulting firm with over 100,000 employees.
6. Global shipping company managing over 100 vessels traversing all the world’s oceans.

Page 32


All six of these companies are implementing Sametime Unified Telephony, and they are in various stages of
deployment from fewer than 200 to more than 50,000 installed seats. Key findings from the interviews include the
following:
• Several of the companies deploying SUT are doing so for the productivity benefits first and foremost. These
benefits far outweigh the deployment costs; in fact, deployment cost is really secondary for these
organizations.
• SUT provides a natural extension of Sametime’s presence, IM, and click-to-connect model. It facilitates
needed interaction with people who must use mobile devices or the PSTN while traveling and makes it easier
to reach people who are outside the organization.
• SUT gives Sametime users the ability to make, receive, route, and control regular voice calls using their
already familiar Sametime client interface.
• More and more people are becoming mobile and they are often working at home. SUT allows companies to
eliminate desk phones for some individuals.
• SUT has call control and call routing capability built in, allowing organizations to eliminate PBXs entirely and/or
to reduce the number of licenses and their corresponding maintenance charges.
• Organizations with PBXs from multiple manufacturers can “front” these PBXs with SUT, providing Sametime’s
consistent unified communications user interface for all users regardless of which PBX they may happen to be
homed to. One user indicated that with SUT, the Sametime client is all they need on a PC, versus an
IM/presence client from one vendor and a softphone from another.
• The world is using social media, and SUT provides integration with all types of social communications
capabilities.
• SUT is a feature rich offering in terms of user environment along with an excellent roadmap.
• SUT can be used as a business continuity and disaster recovery solution. In fact, one customer is
deploying SUT with business continuity as the primary driver after an ice storms and snow closed
• SUT integrates well with other IBM software organizations may have in place.
• Because SUT runs on separate servers from Sametime, the solution can be deployed without any
downtime to normal collaborative processes and remaining PBXs.
• SUT does not require a forklift upgrade; organizations can keep their existing email system (Microsoft
Exchange or Lotus Notes) and their phone systems.
• Younger employees expect tools like Sametime and SUT on their desktops to enable instant, ad hoc, voice,
video, and data collaboration.
• The cost for SUT is between 1/3 and 1/2 of what companies would pay to upgrade legacy telephony
environments.

SUT essentially provides a middleware layer that makes connecting to a telephone (PBX) environment simpler. As the
migration to internet telephony is taking place, SUT can be used to connect IBM Sametime to a vendor’s IP-PBX and
to legacy systems (TDM). Benefits for customers include allowing global Sametime deployments to support regional
PBX decisions while providing a competitive advantage in supporting the migration of users to a single vendor’s IP
PBX over time, without changing the end-user interface. This means you can achieve broad end-user value sooner -
during the migration rather than at the end. In this case we demonstrate return on existing and ongoing investment in
IP Telephony by avoiding 'rip and replace'.

As the lines between telephony and desktop software blur, it is important to view end-user telephony as a natural
extension of an application (like Sametime), a business process or a line of business environment (inside sales, call
centers, etc.).

The fact that IBM offers SUT as an integrated module into the Sametime family allows customers to consolidate
vendors on the desktop and remain assured of an open application strategy that allows them to integrate telephony
functionality into their business applications in much the same way Sametime offers that capability.

Page 33


Integrate SUT with Web apps – mouse over phone numbers and call

Some telephony vendors charge a per user license for their softphones as well as a "port" charge or "license charge"
on the PBX side for each softphone to "register" or "connect" with the PBX. This can add up – port charges of 150USD
per user are not uncommon. SUT includes an embedded softphone so there is no additional charge for softphone
functionality and since the SUT softphone registers directly with SUT there is no extra 'port' charge on the PBX.

Whether you realize all or some of the benefits outlined above, we believe that the ROI potential of Sametime Unified
Telephony can be significant.

Page 34


Call to action and conclusion
In the end ROI is what you measure in your business environment. In this paper we have explored how advanced
communication and collaboration technologies can drive costs down and revenue up in certain business categories –
we called them ROI elements. We have seen a remarkable consistency in the use cases we reviewed and we
conclude therefore that the following 6 business categories are the best contributors to ROI or cost reductions:

1. Process optimization
2. Communications
3. People Productivity
4. Access to knowledge & information
5. Competitive Advantage
6. Travel

By its nature this exercise has been relatively generic and in order to really understand the impact we advise create a
bespoke ROI study together with our Services teams. But there are other things you can do before such an
engagement. Experiment with free ROI calculators to see how your business responds to ROI metrics. Polycom,
Radvision, CISCO, Alcatel-Lucent, Tandberg and others all have useful tools on their websites.

IBM's Business Value Assessment (BVA) method is a well proven business case modeling approach used by IBM and
our partners to help our customers build their investment case for social business and Unified Communications. At
the heart of BVA, IBM Social Business consultant are using ROI models based on Alinean research. Day in the life
demos are also strong way to communicate to executive sponsor.

From IBM Transformation, I encourage to read the “Transforming your voice, video and collaboration infrastructure
The IBM journey toward unified communications” from September 2010. You will find many information about Unified
Communications at IBM and detailed best practices.
ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/icw03003usen/ICW03003USEN_HR.PDF

Summary benefits from IBM Transformation

Readers should use also the Forrester study about Total Economic Impact of IBM Social Collaboration Tools to better
understand and evaluate investing in IBM Social Collaboration tools.
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/pub/lotusweb/Forrester_TEI_IBM_Social_Collaboration_v20Sep10.pdf

You can also perform an quick online analysis with our Business Value Builder. Check it out for free on
http://ibmtvdemo.edgesuite.net/software/lotus/uccroidemo/

Page 35


Resources for further exploration

IBM Social
◦ www.ibm.com/social
Sametime Blog
◦ www.ibm.com/sametimeblog

Experiment IBM Social UC
◦ http://greenhouse.lotus.com
◦ http://tinyurl.com/sametimenow852

Sametime with IBMers
◦ www.ibm.com/collaboration
◦ https://www-304.ibm.com/wikis/home/wiki/sametimewithibm

Wiki IBM Sametime
◦ http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/stwiki.nsf

IBM Sametime 8.5 reviewer's guide
Review the broad range of functions in Sametime
◦ http://ibmtvdemo.edgesuite.net/software/lotus/whitepapers/streview
ersguide.pdf

Page 36


Sources
1. IDC, Worldwide Social Platforms 2009 Vendor Shares, Doc. # 223817, Jun 2010
2. Press Release, Gartner Reveals Five Social Software Predictions for 20-10 and Beyond, February 2, 2010
3. Work Faster, Work Better, Work Smarter – Building agile, collaborative and connected business environments,
IBM, November 2009
4. Study: Inc. 500 outpace Fortune 500 in media adoption, Joe McKendrick, smartplanet.com, March 8, 2010
5. IDC, Worldwide Social Platforms 2009 Vendor Shares, Doc. # 223817, Jun 2010
6. IBM Press Release, IBM Named Worldwide Marketshare Leader in Social Platforms Software, July 2, 2011
7. A new way of working – Insights from global leaders. IBM Institute for Business Value, April 2010
8. Business Communications Review / June 2007, By Permission of Marty Parker, Principal, © Communication
Perspectives 2007
9. “Measuring the Pain: What is Fragmented Communications Costing Your Enterprise?”, a Siemens White Paper.
Copyright © Siemens Communications , Inc.. All rights reserved , Full white paper available from Siemens
Enterprise Network, US: www.siemens.com/us/open/ucsurvey , UK: www.siemens.co.uk/open/ucsurvey, DE:
www.siemens.de/open/ucsurvey
10.“Beyond Dial-Tone – Unified Communications Benchmark Report”, December 2006; © Aberdeen Group.
11. “Driving Workforce Productivity with Unified Communications”, September 2007, © Aberdeen Group.
12.“The Total Economic Impact Of Microsoft Unified Communications Products and Services”, © Forrester Research
2007
13.“Corporate Governance and Climate Change, Consumer and Technology Companies”, December 15th 2008. © A
Ceres report, authored by RiskMetrics Group.
14.“IBM reaps business benefits and major cost savings from unified communications and collaboration”, IBM CIO
Office, Case Study, 2008.
15.Brockmann & Company study of 350 business users of video conferencing,
http://www.brockmann.com/reports/collaboration/1253
16.Cisco IBSG, 2007, Data is based on present value of free cash flows over a three-year period.
17.“Telepresence vs Videoconferencing, Resolving the Cost/benefit Conundrum”, Wainhouse Research, January 28,
2008 Revision 9.
18.“The ROI Of Telepresence, A Total Economic Impact™ Analysis Uncovers Major Value Of Virtual Presence”,
Forrester, February 25, 2009, http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,47629,00.html
19.Unified Communications Featured Article in tmc.com talking about a Frost&Sullivan Telepresence report, see
http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/unified-communications/articles/46615-report-telepresence-help-businesses-
during-economic-crisis.htm
20.http://www.vcinsight.com/, Telepresence and Videoconferencing Insight Newsletter 23 March 2009
21.Wainhouse, Ease of Use in Web Conferencing – Why it Matters, The Cost Benefits Of Making Usability a Priority,
February 2009, http://www.ivci.com/pdf/whitepaper-web-conferencing-usability-wainhouse-ibm.pdf
22.Reported in the New York Times, 22 July 2008. SMART 2020: Enabling the Low Carbon Economy in the
Information Age, June 2008, Global e-Sustainability Initiative www.gesi.org
23.Gartner, (August 2008), « Don't Purchase IP Screen Phones If You Have a PC on Your Desk »
24.The IBM journey toward unified communications (March 2010):
ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/icw03003usen/ICW03003USEN_HR.PDF
25.Wainhouse (November 2011) - The 360° Economic Impact of Sametime and Sametime Unified Telephony
26.“Benchmarking the Benefits of Videoconferencing Deployments” from Wainhouse on Polycom website
27.How Ford Motor Deployed Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) from http://www.zdnet.com/blog/sybase/how-ford-
motor-deployed-bring-your-own-device-byod/2086
28.Environmental report from IBM - http://www.ibm.com/ibm/environment/annual/
29.Forrester Total Economic Impact of IBM Social Collaboration Tools to better understand and evaluate investing in
IBM Social Collaboration tools. /
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/pub/lotusweb/Forrester_TEI_IBM_Social_Collaboration_v20Sep10.pdf

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