building the business case for migration to Microsoft Lync

Are users clamoring for new integrated and mobile communications tools? And is the chief financial officer (CFO) demanding that all departments make further cuts to their spending? One way to meet both of these demands is to update your communications environment with Microsoft Lync.

But before embarking on any IT project, you need to prove that it offers real business value. To help you build the business case for Microsoft Lync, we have put together a how-to guide that you can download here. This draws on our experience in helping  over 40 customers make the switch, representing 700,000 seats deployed, including 350,000 voice ports in 180 countries.

Tangible cost savings are at the heart of any robust business case. This requires an accurate measure of your existing spending and the cost of the managed Lync environment – including the transition costs. Typically we find that our customers are able to make most savings reducing or replacing existing conferencing services, SIP trunking, mobile call offload onto Wi-Fi, PBX replacement, hardware costs and service management (such as simpler MAC).

However, the level of savings that you can make by migrating over to Microsoft Lync depends partly on the maturity of your current telephony and communications system. Put simply you are likely to save more if you are using a legacy PBX with separate conferencing service, compared to a modern IP telephony system.

three measures

We calculate savings using three different measures, which should fall within the following range:

• payback of less than 12 months, which is how long it should take to recoup the initial investment required to make the switch
• total cost of ownership (TCO) reduction of at least  20%. These are the ongoing savings that you will make using Lync compared to the existing infrastructure.
• net present value (NPV) of 8-10% of the project value, which takes the decreasing value of money over the investment period into account.

Analyst Forrester determined similar cost savings in a study that it carried out on a composite customer that you can download here. It found that the deployment of Lync  offered a ROI/IRR of 79%/11%, an NPV per user of $493 and payback within 14 months. Key savings that the study identified included eliminating $1.3 million from PBX and web conferencing spending; $1.7 million from telephony call costs via SIP trunking;  and $3.9 million from reduced labor costs (mainly via easier management).

Get more detail about calculating the business case for Lync in our brand new how-to guide and read the lessons we have learned about Lync deployment in this ebook. You can see all of our information on Lync on this page.