Virtual Office Resource

NTT Communications (News - Alert) company, Arkadin, has come out with managed services to help enable businesses to adopt and get the most out of their cloud-based Office 365 unified communications deployments.

“Arkadin Managed Services for O365 provides real time support for Microsoft (News - Alert) cloud voice, online meetings, Meeting Broadcast and advanced voice requirements (in both Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams),” the company says. “Arkadin’s proven 360-degree methodology ensures high levels of adoption and productivity for customers in their Microsoft workplace transformation journey.”

The managed services include assistance with adoption and training; dedicated account management,; device as a service; migration services; organizational change management; project management; quality of experience; reporting and monitoring; readiness assessments of devices, networks, personas, and profiles;

site transformation services; support; unified communications consulting services; and video interoperability.

These services help organizations lower their risk and better navigate the complexities of voice transformation projects, according to Arkadin. The company is a Certified Microsoft voice partner, and it has more than 15 years’ experience in telephony. It provides services via 56 operations centers in 33 countries.

According to the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications (News - Alert) as a Service, Worldwide, Arkadin is among the market’s UcaaS “challengers”. Others in this quadrant include Microsoft, Google, Verizon, and AT&T (News - Alert).

Global Market Insights says the overall UC market is poised to reach $96 billion by 2023. And it notes the expected proliferation of hosted products in this category. The global VoIP services market is poised for a 9.87 percent compound annual growth rate between this year and 2021, according to new data from Technavio.

And, according to a recent story by The Verge, Microsoft plans to replace Skype (News - Alert) for Business with Microsoft Teams, a year-old service. “Microsoft says it has been building a new Skype infrastructure that has been ‘evolving rapidly,’ and it will serve as the enterprise-grade service for voice, video, and meetings in Microsoft Teams,” The Verge reported. “A new Skype for Business server will be available in the second half of 2018 for customers not ready to move to Teams, but Microsoft is pushing Office 365 users … to move over to Teams as the key communications client instead of relying on Skype for Business.”