One of the most exciting technology advances for businesses today are unified communications services that facilitate communications among employees and clients. For companies that don’t have the capability or desire to operate UC services in house, third-party solutions are available that offer UC as a service, or UCaaS.
UC services offer dramatic benefits to enterprises in terms of creating efficiencies and simplifying communications throughout the operation. Services can include video conferencing, VoIP telephony, instant messaging, chat capabilities, and even data sharing. UC tools allow for a seamless and consistent experience despite potentially different access devices. In additional to operational efficiencies, UC tools can help reduce costs by eliminating travel for on-site meetings and can allow employees to work more easily in the field, or from a remote location.
But UC tools, like any new technology, can be challenging for companies to deploy, particularly if they don’t have the necessary personnel resources in house to deploy and support the technology. UCaaS offers a tidy alternative for companies that would prefer to outsource their UC platform to a third party that can manage and maintain the tools for them.
The growing popularity and availability of cloud services further simplifies UCaaS, as many UC tools and services can be hosted via the cloud. The benefits of delivering UC services via the cloud are numerous. This deployment model allows UC services to be accessed any time, anywhere, which creates significant efficiencies for enterprises.
As with most services hosted in the cloud, cost efficiencies are created by eliminating in-house infrastructure requirements while increasing the effectiveness of business processes. Updates and maintenance of UC tools hosted in the cloud can be undertaken remotely, which creates further efficiencies and cost savings.
An additional benefit of hosting any technology, including UCaaS, in the cloud is that a company can enter the service at a level they are comfortable with, but then scale larger or smaller to meet their changing business needs. Deploying UC tools in house requires a fixed investment and a level of commitment that many businesses and enterprises aren’t prepared to make.
In today’s fast-paced business market, some companies don’t have the time or resources in terms of capital and personnel to build technology systems, such as a UC platform, from the ground up. UCaaS providers have worked to become experts in providing such services to a variety of companies of various sizes and with different requirements.
Once the decision has been made to delve into UC services, companies should take a careful evaluation of their in-house capabilities to deploy and support the platform and also consider the alternative of a third-party deployment. For companies that have hesitated to deploy UC services because of the complexity of building the platform in house, UCaaS might be the open door they’ve been looking for to bring UC services to their operations.