It is as obvious as the usefulness of smartphones that unified communications (UC), which is the consolidation of separate methods such as voice, fax, email, chat and texting, is the direction of business communications. UC takes the many communications channels and rolls them together, making it easy for workers to communicate in the way they need for the task at hand.

The statistics bear this out. The UC market is expected to reach $61.9 billion by 2018, growing at an estimated 15.7 percent per year. UC is the future.

But there is not just one deployment scenario for businesses looking to adopt or upgrade their UC system. In addition to on-premise installations, there are hosted and managed solutions that leverage the cloud. Each solution differs, and each delivers different advantages and disadvantages.

On-premise UC installations resemble their older PBX (News - Alert) cousins in that a business needs to purchase, install and maintain its own IP telephony and UC equipment. It doesn’t have to lease phone lines the way it did before IP telephony, but there still is equipment to buy and maintain.

With a cloud-based solution, however, this hardware and hassle is offloaded to a hosting provider that delivers UC as a service.

Cloud solutions can either come in a plain hosted version, or as a fully managed solution.

Whether hosted or managed, the adoption and acceptance of cloud computing coupled with the proliferation of unified communications is resulting in the growth of the hosted or cloud-based unified communications market, according to a recent report by Transparency Market Research.

Windstream (News - Alert) and TMCnet hosted a Webinar to help businesses decipher the various options and show the benefits of hosted, managed and IP telephony. The discussion explained the differences between hosted, managed and cloud, and how these approaches to UC solutions differ and impact a business. To find out more about this topic, check out the archived version.