Comms budgets stay healthy

Though expensive, telepresence systems help to cut executive travel costs

Most companies will maintain or expand investment in information and communications technology (ICT) in 2010, say analysts. The current downturn in spending means IT managers have a significant opportunity to renegotiate existing deals with telcos, service providers and equipment vendors.

Many firms are looking at ICT to help them trim operational costs, with unified communications (UC), videoconferencing and teleworking applications top priorities.

David Maloney, a principal analyst at research company Ovum, says that many things being done to cut operational costs are those that companies do in any recession, like reducing headcount, capital expenditure and going through invoices much more carefully. But he adds that while IT infrastructure projects, like green computing and cloud services, are being delayed, others are being pushed to the top of the investment agenda.

"According to our research, 50 per cent of companies do not expect their ICT budgets to change, especially for fixed voice and mobile internet where the room for price negotiation is best, while 30 per cent expect their overall communications budgets to increase over the next 12 months," he said.

Hidden Hearing, a subsidiary of Danish manufacturer Oticon, sells hearing aids from over 90 retail locations in the UK and employs around 600 people. It is currently evaluating UC technology, which combines IP telephony, instant messaging, voice mail and conferencing and collaboration features into one platform, to see how its internal comms infrastructure could be improved.

"As a business we are facing a stagnant profit margin and rising operating costs, so we are looking to cut costs and build more intelligence into the ICT architecture we have," said Hidden Hearing IT operations manager, Peter Symes, who heads up a team of 12 ICT support staff and internal software developers.

"Cutting call costs was not high on our agenda. Because we have such a distributed infrastructure with only one or two phone lines at some locations, we needed to make sure staff could route incoming customer calls elsewhere in the company even when they were making an outbound call."

The company takes its lead on its choice of IP telephony equipment supplier from its parent company based in Copenhagen, which already uses Cisco's UC architecture -"a corporate standards thing," according to Symes - and is now looking to replace Nortel analogue PSTN equipment in its UK locations with the same kit.