AVST Whitepaper - Investing in Unified Communications: Evaluating the Total Cost of Ownership for AVST CallXpress®
|
A WHITE PAPER USING CASE STUDY EXAMPLES Investing in your communication infrastructure affects your business in three ways: employee productivity, customer service, and dollar cost. Like any IT investment, communication systems directly impact your bottom line. A unified communications system can provide quick and ongoing returns on your investment. Through improved message management and real-time call completion, a technology-based solution can be a competitive advantage to your organization. Benefits such as increased employee productivity and improved customer service support strategic goals of your organization, but at what cost? To fully understand the business value of an investment, you should understand the benefits, risks and costs. As defined by Gartner, Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is the total of IT costs over time. Costs associated with an IT investment include capital investment, license fees, leasing costs and service fees, as well as direct (budgeted) and indirect (unbudgeted) labor expenses. TCO attempts to capture all of the costs of an IT investment throughout the lifetime of the asset. Then, costs are annualized to normalize labor and capital costs. When evaluating a new system purchase, total cost of ownership is an important factor, but due to complexity, it is often hard to calculate and compare between vendors. The return on investment depends on the system's increase to productivity and revenues, as well as its cost. This white paper focuses on the total cost of ownership for AVST CallXpress®. We believe the information will be helpful to any organization looking to replace or purchase a new unified communications or voice messaging system. This paper will provide you with insight into the real costs of CallXpress, as well as specific factors for comparison to other solutions on the market. In order to provide you with concrete examples of the points in this white paper, we will reference the experiences of a real-life AVST customer throughout this document. The customer is Epicor Software Corporation ("Epicor"), a leader in ERP, CRM and SCM software solutions with more than 1,500 employees. The quotations were provided by Arline Breslin, Director of Telecommunications at Epicor. They currently have 12 CallXpress systems in offices throughout North America. Epicor has worked closely with Advanced Call Processing, an authorized AVST Reseller.
|
  |