The Time Is Right For Massive Teleworking Deployments
September 9th, 2008
Working from home has always been a different IT experience than being in the office. Home connectivity was restricted to dial-in, VPN or client-based solutions with voice service usually being the house phone. This poor experience dampened the growth of teleworking, which was good news for most IT leaders as their concerns were security vulnerabilities and management. But with advanced integration of networks and communications in a small appliance the gap between office and home IT experience is closing fast. A confluence of factors ranging from green initiatives to governmental requirements, work-home life style changes, business expense controls and new teleworking solutions are giving business and IT leaders the motivation to embrace and massively deploy teleworking solutions. Mr. Calvin Chai, Senior Marketing Executive at Cisco is my guest as we discuss Cisco’s new Cisco Virtual Office offering, a teleworking solution that can be deployed in scale.
Teleworking with unified communications is now a major contributor to green initiatives. The thinking is simple, reduce the amount of cars commuting and carbon emissions will decline. On average there are 0.45 Tons of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere for every 1,000 miles driven while a typical commuter travels 7,000 miles per year. Assuming that in the US telecommuters work at home at least one day a week results is some 22.6 million Tons of CO2 that will not be emitted into the atmosphere. That’s just in the US and other countries are more aggressive in their telecommuting initiatives. But to make telecommuting realistic it needs to support multiple endpoints, communication services and all of the conveniences of enterprise communication systems including presence, directory, the corporate dial plan, etc. Combining unified communications with teleworking is delivering on this level of usefulness. Andrey Kuzyk, Senior Marketing Manager Unified Communications at Avaya joins me to discuss teleworking solutions, which helps to support a greener corporation.
