Back in April, I posted an article on how the promise of unified communications (UC) and the ability to take advantage of a host of new sophisticated collaboration tools was finally being realized by organizations large and small via hosted solutions. And, while there is momentum in the market, there remain lingering questions for those on legacy premises-based communications systems, regarding if, when and how, even as the economics of why have become more and more compelling.    

Mentioned at that time was what proved to be an extremely insightful webinar, “Is your business ready for hosted enterprise voice and collaboration?”,  where I was joined by Zach Katsof, NORAM Business Manager & Unified Communications, and David Sommerville, Sales Director Unified Communications from Arkadin, an NTT (News - Alert) Communications Company. As participants found out in detail the answer to the question of whether their organization was ready was an emphatic YES!

As a bit of a spoiler alert, since you are invited to listen to the webinar in its entirety, because of the immense and intense interest in this subject, a few nuggets from the session are worth a look and should be more than inducement enough to encourage a download of the webinar.

One that caught my eye, particularly since IM and Presence are typically the first things along with email that enterprise move to the cloud was one on IM/Presence Utilization.

This highlights not just utilization, but also speaks to the popularity of all of those Microsoft (News - Alert) Lync/OCS and Office 365 installations that in many ways have not be fully appreciated—an area of expertise for Arkadin whose integrations enable customers to fully leverage the value of those licenses along with getting the benefits of the complete Arkadin (News - Alert) hosted solution.

The second one of note goes straight to the bottom line. It is from a case study with Lionfish Creative. Nic WIldeman, Principal of Lionfish is cited saying:

Courtesy of Arkadin webinar, “Is your business ready for hosted enterprise voice and collaboration?”

These types of use cases are powerful testaments as to why the cloud makes sense in general, but specifically for extracting the full value—operational efficiencies along with taking advantage of the fully functionality of UC, hosted VoIP and other collaboration tools—from moving that functionality to the cloud.

If you want to know more about how to improve productivity with hosted UC, why hosted is a great way to support a mobile workforce with limited resources, and the business value of increasing access to information and improving customer responsiveness afforded by cloud-based UC and collaboration, the webinar was a great way to get education fast and in-depth. 

As I noted in the previous posting, UC has for years been long on promise but relatively short on delivering on the full promise it can offer. That is no longer the case, especially when it comes to the needs of small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). This is not long a question of whether your organization is ready to move to a hosted solution for voice and UC, but how fast you can and should get to being willing and able to realizing all of the benefits of UC and universal access to all of your apps and collaboration tools can provide.