Consumer revolution: leading the enterprise

Keep up with the communications evolution with a unified communications network, says Philip Miller

As featured on Finance on Windows Magazine, Autumn 2009

In many ways, financial institutions have more data and information flowing across them than any other industry. Communication of some sort occurs every second of every day relating to every member of staff and every customer connected with an organisation. Whether it’s facts and figures such as the latest trading prices constantly being updated and shared; adjustments to interest rates being made to accounts or the millions of calls handled by a retail bank’s call centre.

Recognising this, financial institutions are flocking in droves towards Microsoft’s Office Communications Server (OCS) to provide them with the infrastructure for real-time enterprise communications. But simply having the right infrastructure in place is only part of the story.

As communications continues to evolve at pace, keeping up with it is a time-consuming and costly pursuit that can, for large banks, run into millions of pounds annually. Gone is the old world order where a single e-mail address, phone number and IM account were the primary means of communication.

Instead, consider the ever-growing ways in which the tens of thousands of personnel within a single organisation can be contacted. Each employee will have assigned to them a landline number, a mobile phone number, e-mail address, SKYPE address, IM address and so the list continues to grow with each new technology development. This creates multiple channels by which to reach just one person. When you factor that in, this will be replicated tens of thousands of times for every employee, not to mention the non-human generated traffic darting from one computer to the next, the pressure on the technology infrastructure is immense.

Of course one of the attractions of Microsoft OCS is that it can make it easier to facilitate each of these different means of communication, but just installing this new service won’t transform how a business operates overnight. Personnel still need to be able to trust the source of the information, they need to trust that nobody else has accessed it, and they need to trust that it complies with all necessary regulations – from Sarbanes Oxley to MiFID.

At Formicary, we are already working with top tier banking institutions to create a unified communications network that integrates every communications related element of the organisation and offers greater security and reliance than if multiple technologies were to be layered and interconnected across the business. 

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