The Cloud Transformation of Unified Communications and Collaboration

By Dan Marshall, National Director of Unified Communications - 21 May, 2020
CloudBlu Collaboration & UC
3 Minutes Read

Cloud-based Unified Communications have experienced slow adoption rates compared to other cloud technologies. Many customers have moved every IT service into the cloud except for their UC system. Why the low adoption rates for hosted and Cloud UC? To put it simply, this is due to need.

Need drives most decisions, and customers simply haven’t needed cloud-based UC solutions, primarily if an organization’s on-prem system has worked with very minimal maintenance.

Additionally, most IT managers have very little interest in managing phone systems, and, for most organizations, these systems and services fall underneath them with the advent of Voice over IP. A lack of eagerness (or familiarity) led a large number of IT Managers to worry about their UC system only when it became absolutely necessary.

COVID-19: A Changing Workforce

Enter March 2020. A pandemic hits the globe, and many organizations are scrambling to provide IT services for a newly minted remote workforce. Companies that had already shifted other applications and services to the cloud encountered a wall when trying to provide calling features to purchasing departments, billing departments, and call center teams (among others) using their historically on-prem Unified Communication solution. Therefore, this begins the Cloud Transformation of Unified Communications and Collaboration.

Today’s cloud and hosted UC solutions are not the products fraught with quality and stability issues of 2012. Bandwidth is abundant, and most manufacturers have implemented packet loss mitigation techniques that recover from all but the most severe interruptions in packet flows. Feature sets are rich and often parallel or exceed on-prem systems, and API access provides customers additional ways to customize their Cloud UC solution to match the needs of their business closely.

Many solutions offer the ability to combine collaboration and UC services into a single stack, enabling companies to streamline how their employees communicate both inside and outside the organization. Layer on cloud-based Contact Center solutions and team-oriented collaboration applications, and you begin to dismantle the paradigm of an on-prem system transporting you into the future of corporate communications.

Plan Your Unified Communication Cloud Journey

Through the early stages of the pandemic, New Era Technology has helped our customers who previously did not need remote UC services leverage SSL, VPN, or SD-WAN technologies to get a dial tone to their remote users. New Era also helped other organizations who were in a slightly better position to build upon their current UC solution to enable remote hard phones and softphones (using hybrid-cloud or private cloud options). The outcome for both scenarios is that cloud UC services will be a topic in every IT planning session until the need for UC agility has been satisfied.

New Era has a rich history in Unified Communications and can help our customers begin and complete their Cloud Transformation of Unified Communications and Collaboration. Whether you are a ten-employee company or a ten-thousand employee company, we can help you identify and implement the right UC solution to help ensure your organization is agile and ready to meet the needs of a changing workforce.

To learn more, please contact New Era Technology at solutions@neweratech.com.

Author: Dan Marshall, National Director of Unified Communications