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Aspect, a unified communications solutions provider, has announced that the company’s global unified communications implementation is now complete.

The last step in the process was the successful deployment of Microsoft (News - Alert) Office Communications Server 2007 R2 to support the company’s Asia Pacific regional headquarters in Singapore.

All voice and voicemail services, audio and Web conferencing, instant messaging (IM) and presence for Aspect (News - Alert) offices in Beijing and Dalian, China; Tokyo, Japan; and Bangalore and New Delhi, India, will be managed with the Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. With this last deployment, 100 percent of all Aspect employees have access to Office Communications Server 2007 R2.

"This demonstrates how a large company can plan and execute a global deployment of Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and see productivity and cost savings success almost immediately," said Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president for the Unified Communications (News - Alert) Group at Microsoft Corp., in a statement "Aspect was able to use its knowledge of mission-critical voice applications and professional services to become a model example for businesses looking to bring the benefits of UC to their organizations."

Since the company started using Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Aspect has enjoyed a number of financial benefits, including $1 million in savings on annual conferencing costs; the elimination of multiple PBXs to produce support savings of $300,000; and the deployment of SIP trunking to create a savings of more than $250,000 annually in telecommunication charges.

"Through the entire deployment of Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Aspect has demonstrated our expertise in developing and implementing a cohesive and comprehensive unified communications strategy that allowed us to be very successful, including exceeding expectations on our initial timeline, ROI and finishing the entire deployment ahead of schedule," said Jamie Ryan, senior vice president, information technology and chief information officer, Aspect.

Functional advantages since the February 2009 deployment include more than 1,100,000 instant messaging sessions; 38,000 conference calls; 6,140 Web conferences with 882,000 participant minutes logged; and 886,000 voice conversations totaling more than 5,800,000 minutes of talk time.

"The Aspect global implementation is a shining example of the company's knowledge and expertise in deploying unified communications across a wide variety of infrastructures in many regions around the world," added Ryan.

Aspect vice president of unified IP, Mike Regan (News - Alert), recently offered a keynote address at TMC’s (News - Alert) ITEXPO West in Los Angeles. Regan shared with audience members that using unified communications in the contact center has shown to yield substantial cost-related benefits, among others.

This is one company that practices what it preaches to clients, implementing unified communications throughout the enterprise to ensure it maximizes the benefits.

Given the few advantages stated here, companies would be hard pressed to find justification for not investigating the benefits unified communications solutions could provide in their own infrastructure. With the global economic crunch, there is no better time to start controlling communications costs.