How to Cut Skype for Business Costs by Overcoming Key Implementation Challenges

Unified communications promise lower costs, but only when IT manages pricing, selects the right tools, and optimizes deployment.

Skype for Business is a dominant voice platform, yet many deployments see higher operating expenses than expected. Why? The answer often lies in deployment choices, governance gaps, and user adoption challenges.

Three Core Areas That Inflate OPEX

Skype for Business can be delivered on‑premises or via a hosted SaaS model. On‑premises gives full control but demands significant capital and operational budgets plus deep expertise. Hosted services shift the spend to operating expenses, but can introduce hidden costs if not managed carefully.

With new cloud PBX and PSTN capabilities, and hybrid options, a single application can balloon the feature set. Mismanagement of these features can drive costs upward.

Choosing the right deployment requires a rigorous assessment of network architecture to support cloud, hybrid, and on‑premises workloads.

Before any migration, IT must confront three common implementation pitfalls that drain OPEX:

1. Routing Policies

Many organizations deploy Skype for Business by linking it to existing SIP trunks, a simplistic strategy that often fails to support extension dialing and complicates user migration.

Implementing a session management layer abstracts dial plans, call routing, and security, allowing policy changes without re‑configuring each endpoint.

2. End‑User Experience

Adoption hinges on how seamlessly users can switch to the new platform. Hardware phones, speaker‑phone usage, and computer availability all influence satisfaction.

Choose the phone solution that aligns with employee habits to keep costs and support overhead low.

3. Call Quality

Handsets typically deliver superior audio compared to softphones, especially on aging hardware. Poor call quality hampers productivity.

Bandwidth‑intensive video and other services can degrade voice performance. A comprehensive network assessment—covering LAN, Wi‑Fi, and WAN—is essential for both on‑premises and cloud‑based deployments.

Pinpointing OPEX Drivers

Even with careful planning, insufficient capacity, latency, and ISP issues can inflate support costs.

Proactive monitoring is the antidote. An effective solution should:

• Track traffic between sites and Microsoft Azure or other cloud endpoints.
• Provide real‑time metrics tied to industry‑standard mean opinion scores.
• Alert on QoS thresholds and surface root causes immediately.

AppNeta’s continuous monitoring uncovers hidden performance problems before they become costly.

To dive deeper into Microsoft optimization, download our white paper 7 Steps to User Experience Success When Moving Microsoft Office to the Cloud.