What is “ UCaaS ” and “Unified Communications as a Service” what do you need to know and how it can help you and your business?
UC and UCaaS (Unified Communications) is where this business communications technology all began, UC was born out of traditional and now legacy telephone systems technology. We figured it would be best to start by explaining what Unified Communications really is, as describing what UC is, as the term UC has been subject to differing interpretations over recent years.
A great place to start is to look at all the different ways we communicate with each other noting that these methods of communication exist both in our business and overlap into our personal lives too. If we consider that this list includes technologies such as normal desk-based office phones, mobile smartphones or tablets, email, Instant messaging, social media, text, voice mails, video conferencing, and desktop/screen sharing, it’s a busy world, isn’t it? Put simply, what UC does is take these many different forms of communication and incorporate and consolidate them together into a single place.
UC was first introduced on legacy telephone systems; it was proprietary and dependent upon the manufacturer of your phone system, and it was also relatively expensive. For these reasons, UC was generally deployed by corporate businesses or early adopters of new technology only.
The magic comes now when we add the “aaS “ (as a Service) “no pun intended” to UC giving us UCaaS.
This simple shift makes this technology available for widespread adoption for businesses of all sizes as it moves the technology to be deployed at the core network within “the cloud” as opposed to at “the edge” of the network in your office.
Suddenly, this technology is no longer cost-prohibitive to the mass business market, UC screams for the cloud which is why right now UCaaS makes so much sense and is so much more accessible. Hosted VoIP telephone systems became the catalyst to this shift, as hosted VoIP was the foundation of this technology which then evolved to encompass UCaaS applications.
Over recent times we have seen rapid growth in the adoption of cloud VoIP-based telephone systems and a general shift away from legacy on-site communications platforms. It is now clear that UC is a leading factor in cloud-hosted VoIP systems “winning the race” with on-premise phone system sales in recent years taking a massive downturn and manufacturers like Samsung and Panasonic pulling out of the market altogether.
UCaaS could be described as “Real-time communications made simple”, it’s all provided from within the cloud with instant access to you and without the costs and headaches of managing your own complex systems.
“Unified Communication technology as a Service” is exactly that, it’s a technology communications service that we pay for it when we need it and someone else manages it for us.
UCaaS speaks right to the heart of how we communicate internally as an organisation and with our customers, it could be considered that technology is where differentiation for any business occurs and I urge you to consider if you could leverage UCaaS to move your business forward.
