Unified Communications Budgeting

Preparing the budgets for your Unified Communications solutions is logical and straightforward if you have prepared a UC Action Plan. With that plan you will be able to get price quotes from the suppliers and prepare your estimates for staffing, facilities, training, professional services and supporting technologies for your plan (see the Table of Contents of the UC Implementation plan in the UC Action Plan section). 

As three guidelines for budgeting, we suggest the following:

1. The article from BCR Magazine, "De-Mystifying VoIP and UC Pricing Trends."  The article looked at the shifts in pricing on a per-user per-year basis (based on a three year life cycle). To date, the industry prices have been tracking to very closely to the forecast of a continuing decline in UC prices. 

A key illustration from that article is shown below. Detailed explanations and numerical tables are in the article.  

 

2. UniComm Consulting has analyzed pricing of a number of vendor configurations for both complete Voice over IP (VoIP) with Unified Communications (UC) elements included and specific Unified Communications (only) implementations. The three year TCO per-user pricing for the average of those cases is shown below. Note this is not per-user-per-year, as in the analysis above; however, the data in this section is consistent with the BCR article above, when like elements are compared; e.g. the BCR article did not include maintenance costs nor operations costs, which are included in the TCO illustrations below.  

Complete VoIP and UC:

UC Only:

 

 

 

3. Vendor Pricing for UC from VoiceCon Orlando 2009 Tutorial, "UC Options: Who's Offering What?" The link is to the complete presentation, which can be downloaded, and to the accompanying voice track, which can be listened to as an mp3. In that presentation each of ten suppliers offered information on their price points for elements of UC solutions:

• Desktop clients for IM, Presence, and "Click to Communicate" features
• Conferencing
• Mobility
• Communications Enabled Business Processes

The summary table is shown below, though it is recommended you review the presenation to understandd the details of this summary table.  The values shown are also per-user-per-year, amortized over a three-year life cycle. As you see, the costs for UC functionality are quite reasonable, and consistent with the forecast above.

Of course, questions are welcome directly to or to the UCStrategies.com Ask an Expert service. 

 

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                Text (c) 2014 M. F. Parker.  Content (c) as indicated.