For many companies, what was once a single office or factory location has transformed over time into a far-flung enterprise with product development, production, billing, marketing and other functions spread across multiple sites, time zones and continents. Moreover, a typical enterprise has nearly a quarter of its staff working outside of its core locations on any given day. So how do you compete as if your employees still work side-by-side in a single office or factory location? Ensuring that work processes flow smoothly through an organization is critical to competitive success—and this is where a notable payoff to those embracing mobile and cloud-based network topologies begins to accelerate.

The move to embed real-time communications features, such as voice, video or online collaboration, into applications continues progressing quickly. You see this trend grow through adoption of enterprise Unified Communications applications such as Microsoft Lync and through ‘click to connect’ WebRTC-type tools found on many websites. The ubiquity of always-on mobile network access coupled with the ability to leverage large pools of data via the cloud has created the perfect environment for real-time communications to take hold.

Historically the challenge for truly enabling real-time communications has been the sheer complexity. We each have multiple work or personal electronic inboxes for voicemail, email and related activities via tools such as LinkedIn or Salesforce.com. Until now, linking all of these applications and points of connectivity in a manner that is cohesive, uniform and actionable has been nearly impossible. With the advent of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and SIP-based applications, a secure, intelligence layer is emerging across today's service provider and enterprise communications networks.

This market transition to SIP is enabling CIOs to fully leverage mobile and cloud advances so they can work across previously disparate platforms, applications and devices. Further, virtualization and the ability to untether historically constrained features have resulted in a dramatic shift in both the economic investment and the overall capabilities of communications networks. Offering new tools or features across an enterprise that once took months to deploy and intense capital outlays now can be completed in days or weeks at a fraction of the cost—often 40 to 60% savings over traditional models. More importantly, as the promise of enterprise-wide real-time communications becomes a reality, users can connect in rich multimedia form to whom they want, when they want, and how they want.

Here is my advice for those just beginning their journey to leverage real-time communications as a competitive advantage:

1. Step back and take full measure of how your customers are interacting with your company: Your advantage in deploying real-time communications, which fully leverage mobile and cloud networks, is that it can deepen your ties with customers and establish new economic models to reduce costs. Amazon's use of its ‘mayday’ button is a great example of this point as it leverages increasingly low cost network models, aids customer satisfaction, and provides a great venue to upsell/cross-sell.
2. Revisit your technology blueprint: As cloud models emerge you have the opportunity to transition your blueprint to a more flexible, cost-effective platform. It is no longer necessary to forklift what you have; you can move forward while ensuring security and extending the capability of your existing communications network.
3. Security is an enabler in this New World, not a hurdle: These real-time apps are both amazing and frightening for CIOs because any employee can take an app, embed a browser and exchange content with contacts inside and out of the organization without additional hardware, software or servers, which traditionally made instantaneous communications a challenge. Yes, foundational controls are required, but so is a changing mindset: a mindset where you invest less on those activities that are becoming commoditized—like content, which we create billions of times per day in the palm of our hands—and more into delivering these real-time apps in a way that provides intelligence without harming your organization. In doing so, security as a mandate suddenly becomes an enabler for your broader IT goals.
4. Don’t be afraid to borrow the best ideas: You're seeing some of the most traditional industries completely reinvent themselves by embracing the adoption of mobile and cloud networks. Global organizations driven by knowledge-workers can now turn projects up or shut them down instantly by enabling real-time communications (whether it be voice, video or collaboration tools) across their enterprise.

The adoption of mobile and cloud network technologies sets the foundation to gain a degree of insight and ownership of our day-to-day communications previously unimagined. We’re no longer figuring out how to put voice over the Internet -- we’re now concerned with securing those communications across mobile and cloud networks so people can communicate with ease. Here’s to the future, in real-time.