What is “Communications as a Service”

The market for Cloud and SaaS (News - Alert) based services is growing significantly because they can be very beneficial in saving upfront capital cost and can grow as you grow. One version of this is Communication as a Service (CaaS). CaaS allows you to use communication services like VoIP and Unified Communications (News - Alert) without the expense of buying and managing communication equipment. This is a very good model for companies with small IT staffs and for those that are growing. Companies like IntelePeer (News - Alert) and Cypress Communications offer services that fall into this category.

Internet-based communications are not a new phenomenon. For many years, we have sent video, voice, and data across the public Internet to communicate at a low cost. However, this type of communications has not been the model for business voice communication. Businesses generally have purchased and run their own communications equipment. CaaS uses cloud based technologies that allow users to communicate – with voice, text, and rich media on a variety of devises delivered as a fully hosted solution. With a CaaS solution, you can leverage enterprise-class communication services without the complexity, cost and time required to build a premises-based solution. CaaS is designed to include a utility-based pricing model that provides users with a comprehensive, flexible and easy to understand service.

The service normally starts by providing reliable basic phone system. Often bundled with the basic service are a handset, local and long-distance voice services, voicemail and some advanced PBX (News - Alert) functionality. Additional services can also include advanced Unified Communications functionality such as video calling, web collaboration, chat, real-time presence and unified messaging. The vendor offers this functionality from one or more remote, secure and reliable colocation data centers. These colocation centers are good locations for this kind of service infrastructure both because they provide a good place to host equipment but also because they provide access to a myriad of network providers.

So when you are thinking of upgrading your communications infrastructure, consider CaaS as an option. IT

Rose Klimovich is Vice President, Product Development and Management, Telx (www.telx.com). Reach her at [email protected]

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