Cutting the Cost of Collaboration

Most organisations have been using a variety of collaboration solutions for as long as they’ve been in business.

As technology has progressed, organisations have embraced first audio then video conferencing as a means of communicating with customers, partners and employees. These modes of communication have progressively been enhanced in quality and combined to give customers broader solutions.

But what can be overlooked in implementing these solutions are the ongoing costs associated with them.

In an exclusive interview with UC Today, Michael Helmbrecht, Chief Operating Officer at Lifesize, said that organisations get caught up in making a choice without understanding what it’s going to take to deploy it, support it, manage it and train users across all their sites around the world.

“Whether that’s at their desk, on their mobile, in a conference room, or in a hotel room, they don’t know whether it will scale and whether the IT organisation can manage it properly for people, because the solution may not be capable of that,” he said.

“It may not really be an enterprise-grade solution that’s designed to work that way or that’s well-engineered to work that way. And they buy into the vision that says ‘okay, this is going to very cheaply solve that problem’, but they create more problems for themselves and become very dissatisfied, very quickly.”

Helmbrecht added that such situations rarely end well for employees and IT organisations because they don’t know what they’ve signed up for.

“Often the solution can scale but does it so inefficiently that they then have to hire more IT people and internal support people around the world to manage all their sites”

These extra costs are not part of the initial financial model. Organisations thinking a solution would be cost effective then face unsustainable costs because they can’t afford all the people it takes to make it effective. This leads to running the solution and not supporting it but somehow hoping people will still use it and be successful. “That happens and that is a reality in the marketplace.”

Better Lifecycle Management

For Helmbrecht, another issue where he sees organisations get into trouble is even worse. It is where organisations may not have the opportunity to assess what a solution will actually cost in time and money to manage, over its lifecycle.

“The first thing to understand is what is the lifecycle of the equipment you’re buying. Are you buying something that has an established track record?”

He said that vendors such as Lifesize can point to multiple generations of product “over the course of, in our case, 15 years, and show what those lifecycles really are and how long customers successfully run and maintain these [systems] as well as how little effort it takes. You also know what the TCO (total cost of ownership) really is, particularly when you take into account downtime, automatic software updating and what you have to do manually.”

Helmbrecht thinks the biggest component of a solution’s TCO, and where many customers often make mistakes, is that they don’t think about the human cost of downtime and when things go offline. They don’t think about all the people and productivity that they’ll have to put into supporting and maintaining it.

“Something being inexpensive to buy does not mean it’s going to be inexpensive to own and manage,” he said.

“The least expensive choice you can make to buy on day one will rarely be the choice that will cost you the least amount of money if you use it heavily over time”