Network infrastructure can evolve over time as new technologies are introduced and operated alongside existing ones. You may not be surprised to hear that it pays to take stock of your current infrastructure components – but then what?

Unified communications
By creating optimised networks – increasingly based on IP technology – and a seamless IT infrastructure, it is possible to integrate voice, data, fixed and wireless networks with a new generation of application technology. This creates some exhilarating possibilities for the ways your organisation can communicate and collaborate.

Convergence has been a big story for some time, and it is easy to see why. Converged IP networks can help you:

reduce cost and complexity
offer opportunities to improve efficiency
enable you to implement new secure and reliable ways of communicating and collaborating inside and outside your organisation and providing more and better services to your customers.

Converged networks enable operational efficiency and provide a unified-communications-ready infrastructure. In essence, convergence is a catalyst for more agile and competitive business.

Taking collaboration to a new level
As high-performance digital networks reach out around the globe, a workforce can embrace the most highly skilled people from anywhere around the world. Convergence helps make it easier than ever before to communicate with and manage a global pool of people, take advantage of flexible working practices, and increase productivity. In addition, many businesses have realised the advantages of outsourcing back-office tasks. You can engage a partner anywhere in the world who can bring you greater expertise and deliver higher quality.

Vibrant business networks
Convergence drives the evolution of traditional value chains into dynamic, multi-directional trading networks, giving businesses enhanced flexibility. This global ecosystem provides new potential for an organisation to connect with customers and suppliers: it creates new channels to market and new sources of products and expertise.

Serving your customers
Convergence offers revolutionary new ways of delivering content, services and applications to different audiences and devices. Linked by networks, IT systems not only allow customers to serve themselves, but can increasingly automate the delivery of products and services.

Convergence is a journey
Using its portfolio of convergence services and unrivalled expertise, and working with its business partners, BT can help you make the transition to a more efficient, IP-based network – giving you the opportunity to implement unified communications.

Together, we can choose a migration path to suit your needs. Our achievable, step-by-step methodology delivers incremental benefits. BT can guide you through the steps to:

1. Consolidate: Rationalise suppliers. This help reduce maintenance costs, simplifies management and creates a true view of network usage and performance.

2. Converge: Unify your fixed and mobile telecommunications and IT infrastructure into a seamless infrastructure in preparation for unified communications. Then converge voice and possibly also mobile data onto the network. You can now begin to exploit the potential of convergence to help reduce costs, introduce new voice and data services and prioritise critical business activities.

3. Extend – to your customers and partners – transformational convergence applications, mainly in communication and collaboration.

By taking the right steps now, a forward-thinking organisation will be ready to meet the challenges of tomorrow.