Cloud-based hosting services combined with unified communications (UC) systems are changing the way small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) function, offering new opportunities to compete with larger businesses across many industries.
It’s an area that has yet to find full acceptance in some industries, as the shift from on-site UC systems to virtual, cloud-based UC systems has had implementation challenges. But now, UC vendors are making good on promises for reliable cloud-based services that are affordable and adapt well to the SMB environment.
“With the power of unified communications (UC) and the use of multimodal devices, it really is time to close the information exchange gap for dynamic interactions between people who are not sitting together in the same room,” said Art Rosenberg (News - Alert) in his blog, Unified View.
That capability offers great potential for SMBs by enabling employees to work together anywhere at any time, which in turns helps increase productivity and collaboration. As a result, SMBs are finally seeing some of the benefits of UC: cost savings, improved efficiencies and more flexibility.
That translates into growth for the UC market. The actual and planned use of UC has risen 54 percent since 2012, according to a November 2013 poll commissioned by Plantronics (News - Alert). Cloud-based services are one reason behind that growth.
The two UC services attracting the most attention from SMBs are mobile extension integration, which forwards calls to a cell phone while also identifying calls made from the cell phone as coming from the company line, and IP telephony, which allows companies to use voice, video or fax connections via the Internet. Other key areas for SMBs include Web and video conferencing, instant messaging and softphones, which allow employees to make telephone calls over the Internet.
For service industries in particular, the biggest advantage of UC is the improvement of customer service and the ability to stay connected with coworkers and customers while an employee is on the road.
“Everyone is rushing to putting applications, data and communications into public, private and hybrid cloud environments, because they are really all becoming software based and serving a variety of multimodal mobile and desktop endpoint devices,” Rosenberg wrote. “So, just as UC is subsuming telephony communications, we are now seeing the next step as ‘cloud’ applications subsume both information storage and UC.”
Edited by Alisen Downey