Companies today are facing tougher business challenges brought on by the increasingly virtual nature of their workplaces. More and more, employees are scattered across regions, nations, and continents—and yet they must be able to collaborate with one another, as well as with partners and customers, at any time and from anywhere.

At the same time, both managers and employees want to keep travel to a minimum, since it’s only getting more difficult and more expensive, both in real dollars and in terms of lost productivity before, during and after the event. 

Organizations need tools to help them lower operational costs while increasing productivity; support remote, geographically dispersed and mobile workers so they can perform as a single team; shrink decision cycles and times to market; and pursue new business opportunities by delivering faster, more efficient customer and partner interactions. 

One of the best technologies for helping companies achieve these and other critical business goals is Crosspoint’s on-demand voice conferencing, which allows for ad-hoc collaboration that’s easy to use and cost effective. Voice Conferences let employees meet on the fly, without making plans or reservations in advance.

With Crosspoint’s on-demand conferencing solutions, the room does not need to be reserved, eliminating the need for a conferencing scheduling system or a Voice Conference operator. As a result, on-demand conferences can be completely ad hoc, or they can be planned in advance and scheduled using any calendaring tool. Either way, end users and IT administrators don’t need to think about the availability of the underlying platform.

On-demand voice conferencing does several things to support the next-generation enterprise: 

• It eliminates the need for IT to schedule and launch conferences, getting users up and running faster and regardless of where they’re located (especially critical for time sensitive issues); 
• It delivers a high-quality conferencing experience, without requiring that end users understand (or even think about) the underlying technology; 
• It enables companies to form project-focused teams comprising co-workers, partners, and even customers; 
• It helps managers integrate conferencing into daily business processes, to improve decision making, knowledge sharing, issue resolution and collaboration; 
• Its simplicity and fixed cost encourages increased, enterprise-wide use, boosting productivity and driving ROI. 

Crosspoint’s solutions offer remarkable picture and sound quality—especially high-definition and telepresence systems that deliver life-like, you-are-there experiences. And because these higher-end systems are operated by a simple remote control device, anyone can operate the new systems, making it easier for end users to routinely leverage the technology. 

On-demand voice makes it all even simpler, letting employees collaborate with colleagues whenever they need to, as soon as they need to—no more reserving the technology in advance. 

Voice conferencing over an IP network can have multiple benefits: Voice over IP costs significantly less than its traditional or old technologies. IP is more conducive to supporting integrated collaboration applications, of which voice is usually a part; and IP supports on demand conferencing, ensuring employees can collaborate whenever they need to, with little or no additional cost. 

Because it’s easy and available, offering voice conferencing on an on-demand basis virtually ensures its usage will increase. This is especially true when it’s run on an IP network, since costs do not increase with use—employees don’t have to wonder if they will have to justify their use of the system. 

Companies that deploy on-demand voice conferencing solutions can bet that employees will use the technology more often—and that can lead to a dramatic increase in productivity, as project teams and departmental groups meet more often and more effectively than they otherwise would. Indeed, it’s common for companies to find that when they offer employees on-demand access to voice conferencing, employees don’t just use it to replace in-person meetings they would have otherwise had; 

they actually use it to meet and collaborate when they would not have in the past. That often leads to shorter cycle times, faster decision making, increased creativity and significantly better productivity. 

Companies today must find cost effective, easy ways for their employees to collaborate across disparate locations, time zones and borders. Travel is growing more expensive and less desirable, but the need for teams, customers and partners to meet face-to-face is not going away—if anything, it’s getting stronger. Thanks to globalization, a rapidly growing number of remote and virtual workers, increased competition and constantly expanding business boundaries, employees must be given the tools to communicate and collaborate, whenever they need to and wherever they are.