The cost savings, increased functionality, improved productivity and mobility offered by VoIP is fast making it a business priority. But what are key factors to consider when evaluating and choosing a VoIP provider, and how can you be sure that the vendor you select will be flexible enough to meet the growing needs of your company?

Unified communications has the potential to create a new breed of knowledge workers, if a clear, organisation-wide implementation strategy and plan are laid out. For the enterprise, UC will deliver a more efficient, anytime, anywhere business environment. This in turn will lead to faster decision-making, better acceptance and use of collaborative tools, work-life balance improvement and an outstanding customer experience. So, is this communications utopia?

The presentation is aimed at a business audience and looks at what exactly we mean by Unified Communications, the business needs it fulfils, the hurdles you jump to deliver an enterprise UC solution and how you should overcome them.

As the world moves from dedicated voice systems to voice applications and unified communication, techniques for testing and verification of all components and services becomes not only essential but critical for successful implementations. This session will explore testing and monitoring strategies for ensuring that this new generation of technology meets customer, employee, and call centre agent expectations while providing the bottom-line benefits originally intended.

These are challenging times, with organisations facing continuous change, including the shift to an agile virtual organisation, increasingly mobile workers, and the unremitting demands to increase productivity and lower costs. The requirement for a multi-channel IP network and unified communications to support all an organisation’s interaction needs has never been more evident. It is becoming increasingly important for IT management to begin to make possible the availability of common communication services, either by infrastructure upgrades or through Managed Services. If organisations have not already, then enterprises should look to put in place the foundation of a converged IP environment.

Andrew Penn will discuss likely scenarios familiar to IT teams across the UK and will look at how current infrastructure need not determine future Unified Communications technologies. Looking across the IT product and service spectrum, this master class will help the IT professional understand what and where their legacy systems are. By using this knowledge they can determine the path to Unified Communications understanding how, with a flexible system and service lead approach, organisations can ensure they are able to adapt to meet the changing needs of both their users and customers.

This session will provide an insight into the latest technologies that will influence the way you operate your business and how you can enable your employees to communicate more effectively.

Having a unified communications strategy is fast becoming an enterprise must-have. This session shows you how to align your communications roadmap with your business strategy and how this can help you build the business case for unified communications.

Every business starts along the path to unified communications - where speed, reliability and network capacity are of the utmost importance - with a unique set of needs and an existing infrastructure. This session describes how companies should go about planning and implementing unified communications in these circumstances

Many vertical industries see VoIP as a cost-effective solution yielding many benefits. This session describes the fundamentals of the business case for enabling VoIP covering productivity, collaboration and cost efficiency.

From desktop to mobile: realising the end-to-end unified communications solution.
The service provider opportunity: delivering differentiated unified communications and mobile services to SMEs
Mobile presence and location-aware context: intelligence and semantic priority in the mobile environment

Unified Communications is a culture change. The old command and control structure is being replaced by a more collaborative way of working. Is your organisation threatened by this, or embracing new ways of working? Your people are your best assets and Unified Communications changes the rules. Others are ready, are you?