How do I ease into UC?

 My company has several business issues that, it would appear, could be resolved with some of the UC solutions that I’ve been exploring.  We’re concerned about the overall cost to implement some of these solutions and we already have a lot of infrastructure and legacy equipment in place.  Would we have to change out everything that we have now or is there a way for us to ease into unified communications solutions?

Many companies have made a significant investment in infrastructure and endpoints and it’s not practical to “rip and replace” everything at once.  That’s why the concept of Self-Paced Migration is attractive to many companies.  This involves creating a UC overlay on top of your existing PBX and over time and moving gradually to a totally IP solution as budgets allow.

OK, I get the benefits of a migration strategy for a company. Then what are we talking about from a timing perspective and is there somewhere that is a good place to start? How should a businss prioritize the steps that they’re going to take?  

 Look at where UC can have the most impact in the company and/or where there is the biggest need.  Here’s a sample rollout that we've used at Aastra:

1. In the first stage the UC solution is implemented as an overlay to existing systems and provides services to teleworkers, small branches and road warriors. It also provides a unified dial plan and UC features such as desktop integration and fixed mobile convergence for high priority users, regardless of their current PBX system.
2. The second phase handles VoIP migration of sites with obsolete systems as these will yield significant productivity improvements as well as important cost reductions and business continuity improvements.
3. The third phase continues the migration with the next set of highest priority sites as defined by the customers overall migration plan.
4. The final phase consists of migration of the largest and/or lower priority sites to complete the migration.

There's a nice article by Art Rosenberg on this site outlining steps for a CIO to help his organization migrate to UC