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Saving money now enables you to invest in areas that will strengthen your position in your industry and help you reach your business goals. Organizations that have consistently followed this strategy during good times are now able to pursue strategic initiatives that others will miss. Here are three principles to follow in saving to invest.

1. Reduce costs strategically to fund investments for improvement: By conducting in-person meetings using collaboration solutions, you can significantly reduce travel costs, accelerate your sales cycle, improve employee productivity, and often return your investment within one year.

Cisco Reduces Travel and Improves Productivity

Cisco invested in its own Cisco TelePresence, WebEx, and Virtual Expert solutions to conduct in-person meetings without travel. The solutions paid for themselves within 12 months. In addition, we expect to gain US$42 million in productivity from senior and executive management, sales, and other experts. We improved sales closure rates by 2 percent, or $127 million, and shortened the average sales cycle by five days. By reducing time spent traveling, the sales organization actually increased its interaction with customers and partners by 45 percent, and improving customer support training with Cisco TelePresence helped us reduce costs in our Technical Assistance Center escalation by $21 million.

Fashion Retailer Accelerates Time to Market

A large fashion retailer requires face-to-face interactions with more than 20 globally distributed agencies to gather ideas, track market trends, and prioritize new product launches, a time-intensive process that significantly slows its time to market for new products. Using Cisco TelePresence, the company has reduced time to market for one brand from nine to six months and plans to further reduce it to four weeks.

2. Focus on profitability: You can reduce the time and costs associated with training, sales, and customer support. Cisco WebEx Meeting Centers, for example, deliver training online on demand, thus eliminating the need for travel and trimming IT costs by paying only for resources you use. And virtualizing workspaces is a way to reduce real estate and energy costs while improving employee productivity. Cisco Connected Workspace and remote access solutions enable employees to commute less and work from almost anywhere.

Cisco Connects Its Workspaces

Cisco has saved more than US$82 million in real estate costs and reduced annual energy costs by $0.6 million by using its Connected Workspace solutions for more than 3,000 employees on the San Jose campus. Connected Workplace is a shift from individually assigned workspaces to a more open environment with enhanced communication capabilities. The result is a flexible office that requires less space per employee and significantly reduces real estate expenses and energy consumption. This workspace is also a better collaborative environment that has improved employee productivity.

3. Focus on capital efficiency: Centralize your communications infrastructure and resources by moving to an IP-based solution. Cisco Unified Communications Manager can greatly reduce or eliminate public branch exchange (PBX) leasing, management, and maintenance costs. The same IP infrastructure can also reduce your mobility costs. When employees place calls from a public mobile network, Cisco Dial via Office delivers them through Cisco Unified Communications Manager on your IP network just as it would for voice-over-IP calls.

Cisco Consolidates Communication Infrastructure

Cisco consolidated 262 disparate PBX systems into 25 IP Cisco Unified Communication Manager clusters. This eliminated $1.5 million in leasing costs and $6.2 million in maintenance costs per year.

Saving for the Upturn

The Five to Thrive Save-to-Invest strategy represents a proven, sound approach for building success. In the current economy, belt tightening should be a strategic exercise that enables investing in ways that position the company to thrive in the coming upturn. Leading CIOs tell us that as they reduce costs in many areas, they are increasing their investments in the collaboration capabilities that will continue to save them money in the future while making their companies more effective.