Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)
Telephone, Conferencing, Collaboration, Presence
Companies of every size, in every industry, and in all parts of the world are deploying UCaaS, a cloud-based delivery of integrated Unified Communications capabilities including voice, messaging, audio conferencing, web conferencing, video conferencing, and presence, to save time, reduce costs, and improve how employees securely collaboration together.
According to MS Cloud Adopt 2011, 49% of businesses say they intend to adopt VoIP from a Cloud Provider over the next 3 years. Google Apps for Business is over 5 million subscribers, Microsoft has experienced an 800% growth in Skype for Business over the last 12 months, and the vendors in the Hosted PBX market continue to expand. Business leaders understand the necessity for all of their employees to focus on the core mission of their business while professionals from their vendors and suppliers deliver on services and support for everything else. One of the type areas that experts recommend for outsourcing is “Specialized Knowledge” - the IT support person or the PBX administrator.
Some companies still prefer to have several vendors for the various product categories they purchase in order to retain the leverage in contract negotiation and ensure the account team remains motivated by the opportunity to gain or lose revenue. These strategies are typically reserved for the large organizations while the small to medium size businesses gain operational and financial benefits from consolidating spend with as few vendors as possible. Customers are demanding connectivity, telephony, collaboration, business grade instant messaging, and a host of other services from a single provider. Furthermore, many are willing to sacrifice on features available from a provider of a single service offering in order to gain the benefits from vendor consolidation.
The market is trending toward convergence. It began many, many years ago with integrated T1 circuits and has evolved into true convergence and application integration from off the shelf app’s to custom app’s. Customers are well informed and understand the benefits and efficiencies that can be driven from convergence and integration from a business process and financial perspective. UCaaS has further altered the market by delivering the services via a cloud-based model that is standardized with a predictable per-seat cost basis.
The technology can finally deliver on the promise of a better user experience, increase in productivity, decrease in travel, lower operating costs, reliability and quality of service. It works.
AS Bob Dylan once sang, the times they are a-changin... To be more accurate, the times they are a-changed. The world’s mobile worker population will grow to ⅓ of the entire world’s work force by 2013. Globally, 1 out of every 3 workers will not be working in the traditional office environment. To bring this closer to home, almost ½ of the North American workforce will be working outside the traditional office by 2016. Currently, 3 out of every 5 employees believe they do not need to be in the office to be productive. These are compelling statistics that support the growth models for UCaaS.
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