As a systems integration firm and Microsoft Gold Partner, I continue to be amazed by the astonishing number of organizations who’ve made a major investment in the Microsoft Enterprise CAL Suite and have yet to deploy the software. Included in this suite, are OCS 2007, SharePoint, Exchange 2007, MOM, Forefront, and Windows Rights Management enterprise software. To prove my point, over 19 Million Office Communication 2007 CALS have been sold within the last 12 months. Less than 5% of these licenses have been deployed. When you compare this deployment statistic to purchases of other competitive software solutions (Oracle, SAP, Symantec etc…) it seems incomprehensible these licenses are just collecting dust. Of course, since our company has a laser focus on messaging and unified communications, we have a bias and a desire to see clients begin deployment of MS Exchange 2007 and Office Communication Server 2007 with a greater sense of urgency. It appears such a waste of IT dollars to ignore the value of this software investment. Moreover, once you use the software applications in your own business environment, you gain an intrinsic appreciation on how they enrich the communications and collaboration within your company. As with the Internet, you wonder how you ever did without Unified Communications once you begin to exploit its value.

As I see it, the time is NOW to begin deploying these licenses and start reaping the benefits they can achieve. Since we’ve become such a virtual and mobile workforce, the need for real-time communications and collaboration is essential in order to remain competitive. Given the current economic slowdown and worldwide recession, organizations must focus their attention on where to reduce costs, improve efficiencies, and boost worker productivity to survive. Yet even today, many organizations fail to recognize the gold in those Enterprise CALS they purchased from Microsoft. You wonder how many of those IT decision makers will still be employed a year from now if they continue to ignore the need to implement a coherent UC strategy for their enterprise. For those forward thinking managers who’ve decided to harness the benefits of their Enterprise CALS investment and specifically UC software, they’ve begun to remove collaboration obstacles and complexity to communication within the enterprise. For them, they’ve begun to remove the pain and frustration for their users and position their organization to maintain a competitive edge despite these challenging economic times.

 
The gold is being mined through the use of IM Presence and Federation empowering companies to communicate and collaborate more effectively within the enterprise, as well as, with customers and suppliers. Collaboration in a dynamic environment enables more effective teaming, resulting in better decision making and getting products and services to market more rapidly. The hard dollar savings are more quantifiable when leveraging the benefits of audio/video conferencing. With bandwidth costs dropping dramatically in recent years, organizations are realizing significant savings in audio and video conferencing. The dramatic rise in travel costs in 2008 coupled with the loss of productivity for workers forced to travel, makes web/ video conferencing a “no brainer” for forward thinking companies. Organizations gain a justifiable payback and have accelerated their ROI models by leveraging their UC software license investment within months. Facing a grim economic forecast for CY 2009, it is even more imperative and urgent for IT departments and business line managers to begin to take advantage of their ECAL investment.

Over the coming weeks, I will be reporting on whether this trend is changing due to economic and competitive factors that are forcing enterprises to rethink their strategy for ignoring the power of Unified Communications for their workers. Moreover, I will be able to share real life instances on how organizations are mining the gold from their UC license investment through aggressive Microsoft incentive programs to stimulate deployments of R2 for Office Communication Server 2007.