Last month we jointly published with Cisco an IDC white paper on the business drivers and advantages for a carrier-based Unified Communications & Collaboration as a Service.
Approximately one-third of enterprises today are using Unified Communications; another 26% plan to use them within one year; and another 28% plan to use them within a longer timescale. As enterprises upgrade their communications, it makes more and more sense to take advantage of “pay as you go” pricing to minimize capital expenditures, especially in today’s uncertain economic environment.
Key drivers of the transition to “as a service” and hosted delivery models are the same usual suspects that are driving many enterprises to move to cloud-based services, including:
- workforces that are increasingly distributed, mobile and virtual
- diminishing bandwidth constraints
- a need to control costs and manage complexity, and easily add or reduce users on demand
- a desire to boost productivity and efficiency through increased collaboration, both internally as well as externally with partners, clients and suppliers
Of course, not everything is rosy in the UCaaS market. According to IDC, some inhibitors to adoption include implementation complexity, the lack of true FMC capabilities, which means mobile integration can be difficult, and interoperability challenges across platforms.
Devoteam
Nothing crystalizes business benefits like a case study. The white paper includes a study of the European network and system infrastructure consulting firm Devoteam's UCaaS implementation. In 2011 Devoteam deployed a fully managed UCaaS solution from Orange using Cisco technology. Some of the benefits achieved by Devoteam included:
- improved voice quality
- pay-as-you-grow model with no capex
- price-per-user (profile) catalog
- predictable budget and reduced costs
Learn more by downloading the IDC white paper with the Devoteam case study here.
Katie
image © frank peters - Fotolia.com
I've spent more than 17 years in global telecommunications, and was formerly responsible for international social media activities at Orange Business. I enjoy making technology accessible to non-techies and I'm a strong supporter of flexible working.