A Friend in Need is a Friend indeed, True for UC & CIOs Date:   Thursday , March 31, 2016 Unified Communication (UC), the term isn’t alien to the technology world but the benefits surely are. Many of the companies still discourage their employees from using their personal devices for professional purpose, while few are embracing the concept of BYOD to the fullest, thus saving huge operational cost. Smartphones, laptops, and other smart devices usage have suddenly surged in the near past, thus asking for a more connected world. While BYOD and enterprise mobility market is to be worth $266.17 billion by 2019, the security concern alarms are still blowing aloud as the unsecured loop holes may cost millions to corporates. This pushes corporates beyond the lines. But rarely do we know that with a proper UC in place, organizations can save an average of 32 minutes per employee per day as UC enables staff to reach one another on the first try. UC can empower employees to collaborate more efficiently allowing them to focus on their core business goals and avoid communication barriers. Period. With enterprises functioning on global platform, UC solutions benefits such as reduced total cost of ownership, reduced travel time and expenses, improved collaboration, and the ability for all employees to connect faster and get more work done, will work as an elixir. Along with the integration of real-time communication services such as instant messaging, presence information, IP based telephony, video conferencing systems, data sharing, call control and speech recognition, these services can be coupled with non-real time communication services such as unified messaging applications. Fortunately, today we have several unified communications solutions to make the life of CIOs simpler in terms of interoperability with other systems and stay connected with the global workforce without impacting much on the operating cost.