WHITE PAPER SPON. Pain Free Unified Communications and Collaboration. Published May 2011 SPONSORED BY. An Osterman Research White Paper.

Transcription

1 WHITE PAPER N Pain Free Unified Communications and Collaboration An Osterman Research White Paper Published May 2011 SPONSORED BY sponsored by SPON sponsored by Osterman Research, Inc. P.O. Box 1058 Black Diamond, Washington USA Tel: Fax: info@ostermanresearch.com twitter.com/mosterman

2 Executive Summary Unified communications is an important capability that offers a number of benefits, including: The ability to integrate , voice and instant messaging into a more cohesive communications system than most organizations have available to them today. The ability for users to launch a Web conference, audio conference or videoconference easily and from within another communications tool, thereby enhancing their productivity. The ability to better support mobile users, giving them a productive work and collaboration experience even when they are away from their normal work environment. Faster decision making because all of the data that users and organizations need is available through any access point and users can communicate with others inside and outside their organization more easily and more quickly. Lower overall IT and telecommunications costs, particularly for labor, because of the inherent economies of scale available with an integrated communications platform. There is a large and growing number of unified communication platforms on the market today. Most of them provide, in varying degrees, very good performance and all of the benefits noted above. However, there are significant differences between leading systems in terms of how easy they are to deploy, how much labor they require to manage (or that they can save relative to non-unified communications), and their total cost of ownership. KEY TAKEAWAYS Three are three key points discussed in this white paper: Unified communications provides a better experience for users than non-unified communications in the context of improved employee productivity, better and easier support for remote workers, and faster decision-making. IT will benefit from unified communications because the combination of messaging and telephony is easier and less time-consuming to manage than when these systems are operated as separate siloes. Unified communications allows organizations to be more flexible. By giving users a communications and collaboration experience that is identical on any platform desktop at work, laptop at home or mobile in a remote location companies of all sizes have more flexibility in how and where their employees work. ABOUT THIS WHITE PAPER This white paper discusses the benefits of unified communications and how organizations can easily and inexpensively deploy and manage a robust, world-class unified communications system in any size of organization. It also briefly discusses IceWarp the sponsor of this white paper and its unified communication offerings Osterman Research, Inc. 1

3 Exactly What is Unified Communications? Unified communications is what its name implies a unified set of communication tools that are accessible from a single interface and integrated into a single management system. Unified communications includes , calendaring and scheduling, voice/telephony and real-time communications capabilities that are presented to a user through a thick client and/or a browser-based interface. Other capabilities that may be included in a unified communications system include text messaging/sms capabilities, fax services, mobility services and Web conferencing. Many systems also integrate security capabilities like intrusion prevention, antispam services and anti-virus capabilities. WHY DEPLOY UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS? Consider the conventional communications infrastructure in the typical workplace each computer user normally has: An client that includes calendaring and scheduling (most often Microsoft Outlook) A desktop telephone An instant messaging client A mobile phone that, among other things, offers text messaging/sms services Access to a departmental fax machine This setup works reasonably well while the user is in the office, but there are some limitations. For example, messages are accessed in an client on the computer, calls are made and voic messages are accessed through the telephone, instant messaging conversations are conducted in a separate client and text messages are sent and received on the mobile device. When faxes are sent or received, users must walk to the fax machine and process individual pieces of paper. However, when users need to work remotely, their desktop telephone cannot be used, faxes are largely inaccessible without the assistance of someone else in the office, and text/sms message content is available only via the mobile device. The only communication mode that works more or less like that of the in-office experience is . While this conventional approach allows users to be productive up to a point, consider the use of a unified communications system: Users can send or receive , make calls, access voic , conduct instant messaging conversations, send or receive text/sms messages and send or receive faxes from a single interface, and data can be shared electronically between all of these communication modes. These capabilities are accessible on any platform a desktop computer, a laptop or a mobile device and via a thick client or a Web browser. Clearly, the second scenario is preferable for users who need to work more efficiently, particularly when traveling or when they must work from home. However, such a unified communications system is also preferable for the IT and telephony groups to manage because they are not managing individual communication siloes, but a single system, resulting in synergies that would not be possible in a conventional scenario. Moreover, the organizations that deploy unified communications systems also benefit in several other important ways: 2011 Osterman Research, Inc. 2

4 Because users have access to all of their communication tools from a single interface, they can be just as productive when on the road or when working from home (e.g., during periods of inclement weather) as when they are in the office. This gives decision makers the flexibility to allow their employees to work from anywhere, resulting in an enhanced user experience and potentially greater retention of employees. More strategically, however, if employees have access to all of their communication modes from a single interface, it does not fundamentally matter where they work. This allows organizations to operate with much less office space than would otherwise be required if an office or cubicle must be made available for every employee. For example, consider the following, fairly conservative, example in which a unified communications system is deployed in a 500-person company, enabling employees to work from home and be fully productive: o o o Employees average one day per week working at home. Real estate costs are $20 per square foot per year. An office requires an average of 150 square feet per employee for the work and common areas. Based on these assumptions, a 500-person organization would save $300,000 per year on real estate costs alone: (500 employees x 20% working from home x $20/year x 150 square feet/employee) The result is that a unified communications system will save the organization an average of $600 per employee per year, or $50 per employee per month, simply as a result of reduced real estate costs. Power savings, reduced taxes and other savings will make the return even more substantial. This means that even if unified communications capabilities were more expensive than conventional communications systems, an organization that deployed unified communications would still end up realizing significant hard cost savings. Moreover, employees who can work at home even just one day per week will realize significant reductions in their personal automotive expenses an important consideration as gasoline costs worldwide continue to climb. MOST ORGANIZATIONS HAVE YET TO DEPLOY UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS A major Osterman Research study in the second half of 2010 found that only 42% of mid-sized and large organizations in North America have deployed a unified communications system, although this is up significantly from 34% of organizations in a major study conducted by Osterman Research during However, not all users in the organizations that have deployed unified communications have been provisioned with these capabilities.!!conventional communication environments where end users have a separate client, instant messaging client, desktop telephone, fax machine and browser-based web conferencing capabilities predominate today. Respondents to the 2010 Osterman Research survey indicated that 81% of their users worked with such a conventional communication environment in 2010, and forecast that this will drop to 63% in 2011, and 45% in At the same time, 2011 Osterman Research, Inc. 3

5 the proportion of users employing unified communications will increase from 21% in 2010 to 38% in 2011 and 58% in WHERE TO START? However, one of the key issues that organizations will need to resolve is where to start deploying unified communications. For example, should an organization use its existing PBX as the starting point and then add capabilities like video conferencing, , mobility and presence into that infrastructure? Should it begin with its system and then add voice, presence and audio conferencing into the mix? Should it choose a middle route and preserve its and PBX infrastructures as they are now and simply glue them together to provide unified communications capabilities? Osterman Research anticipates that the majority of organizations will begin from an centric perspective, migrating to new generations of these systems that are evolving into unified communications platforms. As such, and stated perhaps too simply, systems will morph into unified communications platforms over the next several years. THE KEYS TO ADOPTION WILL BE LOW COST AND EASE OF MANAGEMENT Although unified communication systems offer significant benefits in the context of improved employee productivity, lower real estate costs and lower taxes, the key drivers will continue to be driving cost out of the IT infrastructure a major cost for most organizations. Further, the same Osterman Research study mentioned above found that among the top four reasons for not deploying unified communications are the up-front cost of unified communications solutions and the on-going maintenance costs associated with these solutions. Consequently, unified communications systems must reduce the cost of the IT labor required to manage today s disparate , telephony and other communication systems. Further, if a particular unified communications system has lower licensing or deployment costs, this adds to the cost benefit that can be realized. Reducing the Cost of Unified Communications Osterman Research investigated the cost of deploying IceWarp Mail Server, IceWarp s unified communications platform. To do this, we conducted an in-depth survey of several IceWarp customers, both enterprise customers and service providers employing IceWarp Mail Server as their hosted platform. We asked a number of questions, including the following: How many physical servers are running IceWarp Mail Server in your organization? What server configuration are you using? What percentage of your users employ various mobile devices with IceWarp Mail Server? How many person-hours did your IT staff, external consultants and others spend on various tasks when you deployed IceWarp Mail Server? 2011 Osterman Research, Inc. 4

6 Now that the system is up and running, how many person-hours do your IT staff, external consultants and others spend on various tasks during a typical week? How many person-hours does your IT staff spend managing IceWarp Mail Server during a typical week? How many person-hours do they spend managing it during a bad week? How many hours during a typical week does an external consultant work on managing IceWarp Mail Server during normal and bad weeks? How many person-hours does your IT staff spend managing your mobile messaging capabilities in IceWarp Mail Server during a typical week? How many person-hours do they spend managing it during a bad week? During a typical month, how many minutes of unplanned downtime do you experience in IceWarp Mail Server because of things like server crashes, loss of connectivity, denial-ofservice attacks, etc. and how many person-hours does it take to resolve one of these incidents? During a typical month, how many minutes of planned downtime do you experience in IceWarp Mail Server because of things like routine maintenance, upgrades, etc., and how many person-hours are spent by your IT staff planning/executing one of these planned downtime incidents? Overall, what your thoughts on IceWarp Mail Server compared to other unified communication systems you have managed, how easy or difficult it is to manage, the kind of support you get from IceWarp, how well it performs during peak demand periods, etc.? WHAT WE FOUND Our research returned some very interesting results that underscored the low cost of ownership that IceWarp Mail Server can provide to both enterprise customers and those operating the platform as a service provider. For example: Server loading The enterprise customers that we surveyed are supporting between 300 and 759 users and, with one exception, each company surveyed was running just one physical server operating the IceWarp Mail Server software. Further, the hardware on which the server software is running was not overly robust the typical configuration was an Intel Xeon processor with 16 gigabytes of RAM and less than two terabytes of disk space. Service providers are using somewhat higher-end processors with more RAM and disk storage, but they are achieving very high server loadings: with the exception of one very small service provider, those we surveyed are supporting anywhere from 1,854 to 37,500 users per server, with the typical user level at 5,000. Obviously, the advantage of supporting more users per server as well as running all unified communication services on a single server is that the cost of the infrastructure is kept low. Further, because the cost of the server hardware per user is very low, it means that very high end server hardware can be deployed with little impact on the lifecycle cost 2011 Osterman Research, Inc. 5

7 per user. For example, if we assume that a $10,000 server can support 5,000 users, the cost of the hardware over a three-year lifecycle will be only $2.00 per user, or just 5.6 cents per user per month. Initial deployment costs Our research also found that the IT labor investment required to set up IceWarp Mail Server was fairly minimal: a mean of 69 IT labor hours for enterprise customers. If we assume that IT staff members have a fully burdened annual salary of $80,000 annually ($38.46 per hour), the initial labor cost for setting up the entire IceWarp Mail Server infrastructure is $2,638 for the typical enterprise customer. In our survey sample, the total cost of labor per user for the initial setup ranged from $3.14 to $9.21 per user, a very modest amount, particularly when spread over the typical three-year lifespan for a communications platform. For service providers, the initial deployment effort to set up a new server in the data center requires only minimal effort an average of just 3.4 IT staff hours. Ongoing maintenance costs From a cost perspective, the IT labor required to manage any communications system is the most critical element because it is normally much greater than any other single cost of managing a platform. Our research found that IceWarp Mail Server requires a mean of 1.34 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff per 1,000 users using the fully burdened salary figure noted above, this translates to just under $108 per user per year, or $8.96 per user per month. This includes all of the activities related to dealing with user problems and downtime incidents, not just managing the server or software itself. The figure of 1.15 FTE staff per 1,000 users for IceWarp Mail Server is significantly less than what Osterman Research has found in its research for other not unified communication platforms. For the mid-sized organizations that were the primary focus of the IceWarp Mail Server research project, some competing systems would require anywhere from 10% to 80% more IT staff involvement to manage on an ongoing basis. For the service providers that we surveyed (with the exception of one very small company), we found that the cost of ongoing IT labor to manage IceWarp Mail Server ranged from just $0.32 to $2.10 per user per year, dramatically less than the cost of many competing platforms. Unplanned downtime Another major issue that both enterprises and service providers must address is unplanned downtime. Our research found that enterprise environments running IceWarp Mail Server experience a mean of 28 minutes of unplanned downtime during a typical month, while service providers experience a mean of 33 minutes per month. This translates to a relatively high service level of % to % during a typical month. These figures are about average for the communication systems that we have recently studied. For example, a recent Osterman Research survey of various systems found that unplanned downtime averaged from eight to 42 minutes during a typical month, putting IceWarp Mail Server in the middle of the pack relative to these other systems Osterman Research, Inc. 6

8 CUSTOMER COMMENTS Our research on IceWarp Mail Server also provided customers with the opportunity provide their views on the platform. Here are some of the unfiltered comments provided: Service provider with 10,000 users and 106 customers IceWarp is very easy to manage and provides our customers with more than is required. The support is professional and quick to resolve problems. Service provider with 31,520 users and 5,230 customers [We have] found IceWarp to be a very efficient file-based hosting server for Webmail, POP3, IMAP and mobile device customers. The Webmail is fully featured and works well for the majority of our client base. [Our] technical staff has developed a toolset leveraging the IceWarp API, which has proved useful in centrally managing large numbers of domains and users spread across multiple IceWarp hosting servers. The full suite of unified communications has not been deployed to [our] hosting customers as [we have] focused on the hosting capabilities of IceWarp to date. US-based user with 759 users and seven physical locations IceWarp is very easy to manage. Compared to other systems, IceWarp is very competitive. It is a good stable communications system that is price competitive and feature rich. Their support is good and readily accessible. US-based user with 300 users and six physical locations IceWarp is a very stable and reliable product that has seamless integration with anything we can come up with here. It is very user friendly from a management perspective and the upgrading maintenance processes are very simple and straightforward. The IceWarp Team is to be highly commended for such a great product. Summary and Conclusions Because unified communications integrates today s largely separate communications modes, it will increasingly be a critical success factor as organizations of all sizes attempt to increase employee productivity, drive down IT costs, and increase the overall flexibility and agility of their organizations. To accomplish these objectives, a unified communications platform must be reasonably priced, easy to manage and highly reliable. Our research has found that IceWarp Mail Server is such a platform and compares quite favorably with competing unified communications platform from other leading vendors. About IceWarp Unified Communications is IceWarp's sole focus and has been our raison d'être for over a decade. Built with the best features of communication, collaboration, security and mobility, IceWarp revolutionizes how organizations work and communicate. We develop solutions capable of serving the entire spectrum of organizations from small businesses, to enterprise, to multi-million user data centers on the same scalable, secure and affordable platform Osterman Research, Inc. 7

9 IceWarp has introduced many industry firsts that have become standards in communication, including: The first mail server to support TLS/SSL The first mail server with integration Webmail The first mail server with support for one-click backup and restore The first fully integrated, multi-threaded anti-virus capability The first fully integrated anti-spam capability The first groupware solution with an API The first groupware solution based entirely on OBDC IceWarp s unified communication solution, IceWarp Mail Server, is a highly integrated solution, including Mail Server with dual Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus protection and available add-on options that include the IceWarp GroupWare Server, Instant Messaging Server, Text Messaging Server, a unified Web client interface, full mobile device synchronization and much more: server Instant messaging server VoiIP/SIP server Text messaging/sms server Mobile support through Microsoft ActiveSync Mobile device management capabilities Outlook connector A desktop client IceWarp was founded in early 2001 and continues to garner respect within the industry and across every market niche. The same server can easily be used by SMBs, enterprises, data centers alike, delivering exceptional scalability as an organization grows Osterman Research, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced in any form by any means, nor may it be distributed without the permission of Osterman Research, Inc., nor may it be resold or distributed by any entity other than Osterman Research, Inc., without prior written authorization of Osterman Research, Inc. Osterman Research, Inc. does not provide legal advice. Nothing in this document constitutes legal advice, nor shall this document or any software product or other offering referenced herein serve as a substitute for the reader s compliance with any laws (including but not limited to any act, statue, regulation, rule, directive, administrative order, executive order, etc. (collectively, Laws )) referenced in this document. If necessary, the reader should consult with competent legal counsel regarding any Laws referenced herein. Osterman Research, Inc. makes no representation or warranty regarding the completeness or accuracy of the information contained in this document. THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED AS IS WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED REPRESENTATIONS, CONDITIONS AND WARRANTIES, INCLUDING ANY IMPLIED WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ARE DISCLAIMED, EXCEPT TO THE EXTENT THAT SUCH DISCLAIMERS ARE DETERMINED TO BE ILLEGAL Osterman Research, Inc. 8