Asset Efficiency

You can make some real differences to the way you manage your communications without having to purchase an expensive upgrade every time you want to update your networks. Wherever possible, we advocate making the most of your assets to save you money, and we’ll assess your existing communications environment at any point to find ways of increasing your asset efficiency.

We’ll always look for new ways of managing your technology and improving your communication efficiency that you might never have considered before. For instance, have you ever thought about buying your communications as an on-demand service for a predictable fee per month and per user? Or what about recouping some of the cost of your initial investment by leasing any excess capacity in your network to other enterprises?

And when was the last time you looked at the total cost to run your data network? Did you know that Enterasys data equipment requires half the real estate, power and HVAC of equivalent Cisco equipment? Did you know that the annual Enterasys cooling costs are $24,000 less than costs to cool Cisco hardware serving the same number of users? And, did you know that an Enterasys network typically requires one-fifth the staff support versus a Cisco network? It’s true. And these facts have serious costs implications associated with the energy consumption, utility bills, floor space and carbon footprints of your organization.

As we’ve proven at other organizations, maximizing your communications efficiency doesn’t just have to mean increasing the utilization of your existing communications investment or consolidating IT, network and communications solutions. It can also be about finding creative new ways to pay for your communications or even turning it into a new revenue stream.

Sometimes though you’ll need to replace unused or unwanted assets. The good news is that an investment in flexible Open Communications solutions will not just improve communication and collaboration amongst your people, but will also increase asset efficiency. Take our unified communications solutions, which deliver productivity benefits by letting your people work more flexibly, but also can increase asset efficiency by freeing up your real estate for alternative uses.

Our Voice solutions take the complexity out of your communications environment. These not only have cost efficiency benefits in consolidating assets, but also let you roll out the benefits of Open Communications to more people and locations, by making it easier to deploy services worldwide in one go, rather than on a national or regional basis. It’s a way of doing more for less with your communications, to achieve the ROI you expect from your investment.


Flexible working has efficiency benefits too

Being able to work effectively from wherever you are brings more than productivity benefits for your organization. Most people know about team productivity benefits associated with flexible Unified Communications solutions, such as OpenScape UC Application. But did you know it also frees up the use of your premises? So you can adapt them to suit your cost base or even consolidate your existing real-estate rather than paying a premium to co-locate people who aren’t based on site most of the time. Delivering Voice services to employees in satellite offices (where real-estate is less costly) or home-based offices also creates asset efficiencies, while upgrading collaboration capabilities inside and outside the enterprise walls. Plus, being able to choose between an on-premise installation or a hosted software service allows you to defer large capital investments for licenses and instead pay a monthly fee. So being flexible has benefits for your remote workers and your company finances.

By adopting teleworking initiatives internally and using OpenScape UC Application ourselves, we have lowered the cost of supporting our remote teleworking employees by over 70%. It’s just one example of what we can do to make your organization more efficient.  


Leverage contact center services from anywhere in the world

Don’t forget those remote workers that aren’t based in central offices when planning your communications strategy. Our OpenScape Contact Center solutions offer you a data center-based approach, so you can open up the application to workers anywhere in the world. All they need is an internet connection and a minimally configured desktop, and they’re good to go. Customers won’t know that they’re talking to someone sat at home rather than in the call center as the customer experience is the same. So customers benefit, as do you, with lower real-estate costs, a lower carbon footprint and happier, loyal agents that will find it hard to leave your company.  

Why? Here’s an example:  100 agents commute an average 56 minutes per day for a cumulative 70,000 miles and produce 210 tons of CO2 per year. With at-home agents, this environmental impact is completely avoided, the agents are available more hours a day to take inbound calls, and they effectively give themselves a raise by not spending money on daily commutes. Your customers win by having a better service available for more hours in the day, your agents win by being kinder to the environment and saving their money and your company wins too because all assets involved have achieved peak efficiency.


No need to rip out and replace when you’ve got IT Telephony

We don’t believe in ripping everything out and starting again if it’s not the right strategy for your organization. By consolidating and finding ways of increasing the utilization of your existing assets, our Voice solutions can help increase your overall asset efficiency. In many cases, you can re-use existing PBX solutions as media gateways or transfer user licenses to new platforms or devices.

Although we don’t believe in waste, we’re not stuck in the past. Where it makes sense from a financial perspective or for growing the company, we will advocate the use of new business models, such as managed or hosted services that can be paid for on a per-user basis, or we will support you in getting your operations lean and efficient. Alternatively, have you ever considered using your communications system as a platform for offering hosted communications services to others? It might not suit every organization, but that’s the point. Our Voice solutions help you make the most of your communications infrastructure according to your needs, and nobody else’s.

And while you’re entertaining new models, think about this new green reality. For enterprises with multiple call center operations, the OpenScape Contact Center provides a single-server, software-based solution requiring minimal support staff, hardware, real estate, and energy. This solution set supports up to 1,500 agents using a single multi-tenant server with shared telephony resources – a much greener approach versus hardware-intensive solutions.


Sell book assets to realize new revenue

Where circumstances permit, the OpenScale services portfolio provides the option for customers to ‘sell’ their communication assets to Siemens. There are two benefits in releasing book assets. First, you’ll receive a cash injection for assets that may have already depreciated 100% in value. Second, when you transfer ownership to us of assets that still retain book value, you can remove the asset value from your balance sheet and avoid asset-related taxes. You’ll also still have full use of your assets, as we’ll lease the technology back to you but on a much more cost-friendly capex price per port (or user) basis.

Over time, we’ll continually look for ways of improving the rate and flexibility of our service too. So you might prefer a leasing agreement whereby we own the technology located on your premises or you might want to move to a fully hosted communication services model. We’ll do the hard work sweating your assets, but the choice of service model is yours.


Upgrade to a more flexible and manageable Open Communications environment

Managing your communications networks doesn’t have to be an uphill struggle. Our OpenScale services seamlessly consolidate networks and sites and deliver more flexible ways of running your networks. We start by building up a picture of your technology infrastructure: its age, locations, configuration and traffic flows. This gives us a good idea of whether you need to replenish, relocate or upgrade your communications. We’ll also be able to make changes to the network configuration that could potentially reduce costs, speed up access and even eliminate the need for some data hubs and servers.

If you need to replace assets, we’ll help you with the cost as part of our Service Management by wrapping it all in with the monthly per user cost, so you won’t have to absorb any big payments to start benefiting from the technology. Full service delivery outsourcing can take even more costs out of the equation, whether by enabling you to consolidate branch offices or by making it easier to add new users when they join the company. There are plenty of options out there to choose from – it’s just a case of finding the right one for you.