Ferris Research Announces Results of First Cost Analysis of Microsoft Unified Communications

First published research finds that Microsoft Exchange 2007 + OCS 2007 + telephony can cost up to $180 per user per month for small businesses.

New York, NY (PRWEB) November 19, 2008 -- Ferris Research today announced the results of the first study examining the costs of Microsoft's unified communications (UC) offering, concluding that costs for small businesses can run as high as $180 per user per month and that these companies "risk a lack of return on the investment" due to these costs. The white paper, sponsored by Unison Technologies is available at www.unison.com/ferris.

The white paper examines the direct costs for organizations with 50, 500 or 5000 staff in deploying and maintaining Microsoft's latest offering, which consists of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and a third-party PBX system. Typical costs were found to be as follows:

risk a lack of return on the investment

While these costs are more affordable for larger enterprises, SMBs may find it difficult to justify the investment - especially at a time when IT budgets are under greater scrutiny

Our research focused on the total direct costs associated with Microsoft UC, including staff time, hardware and software, providing SMBs and larger companies with a broad indication of the investment involved.

Unified communications has traditionally been expensive to implement and Microsoft's new solution is no exception. We believe that the new study from Ferris Research underpins our vision that SMBs need a new and more affordable approach to unified communications, such as the one offered by Unison™.

Built from the ground up with the SMB market in mind, Unison is a new concept in software - fully-unified communications. It integrates all major communications onto a single server - Unison Server™ - which powers e-mail, instant messaging, telephony, contacts and calendaring. Users access the server via Unison Desktop™, a native application for Linux or Windows, which gives them all communication in one place.

With a single server handling all business messaging, the IT department drastically reduces costs because it no longer needs to purchase and maintain an expensive email or groupware server, a directory server or instant messaging system and a separate PBX system. In addition, with Unison Desktop, users are more productive because they get always-synchronized access to their e-mail, instant messages, telephone calls, voicemails, calendars, address books and more, and therefore communicate much more efficiently.

A copy of the white paper is available free of charge at www.unison.com/ferris. Unison is available as a download or demo from the Unison Web site at www.unison.com or via partners.

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