Leadership And Technology: A Total-Cost-Of-Ownership Comparison For Unified Communications And Collaboration

Leadership and Technology: A Total-Cost-of-Ownership Comparison for Unified Communications and Collaboration Midsize organizations strive for success. Being successful means consistently making smart decisions— including smart technology purchases. Technology should enable a midsize organization to meet the needs of its employees and customers today and also allow the organization to make simple but rewarding changes in the future. Technology must support changes that occur in a business without increasing the risks associated with providing excellent customer service, engaging with suppliers, and conducting many common business processes.

Some believe that leading technology comes at a higher price, but recently updated research from Analysys Mason has shown this assumption to be false. We found that an average 500-user organization can adopt a feature-rich, scalable unified communications (UC) solution from Cisco for less than competitive solutions. Over a 5-year period, the Cisco® Business Edition 6000 (BE 6000) solution—a unified communications solution built for midsize companies—was US$15,000 less than the comparable solution from Avaya, US$163,000 less than the comparable solution from Mitel, and US$100,000 less than the comparable Siemens solution. Figure 1 shows the 5-year total cost of ownership (TCO) for these four unified communications solutions.