Posts Tagged Under: UC

UC&C Hits Mass Adoption in North America, Vendors Now Focused On Quality

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Who says Unified Communications is slow to take off? In an analysis of the North American hosted IP telephony and UC&C services market, Frost & Sullivan reports that 2014 saw 8 million installed users, with a projection of 41.9 million users installed by 2021. That number will be mostly small and medium businesses (SMBs). Next in line will be large, distributed organizations looking to streamline their communications infrastructure and IT operations, while managing a remote workforce.

As it transitions from the early-adopter to mass-adoption stage, the North American hosted Internet Protocol (IP) telephony and Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) services market is seeing growth rates accelerating. This is mainly due to an increase in customer awareness of cloud communications benefits. Providers are now compelled to differentiate their products through innovative features as scrutiny of service quality and reliability has increased. Vendors’ focus is gradually switching to refining their UC offerings, after successfully convincing SMBs to adopt the technology.

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Fear Is The #1 Obstacle In Deploying UC&C

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Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) as a technology has unquestionable perks for productivity. In some cases, a good UC&C implementation leads to new revenue streams, a goal that sits high on every CEO’s agenda, yet many are reluctant to take the plunge. The reason itself is surprising.

Business leaders are regarded as anything but fearsome, but when it comes to investing in new technologies, many executives start to get cold feet. In a whitepaper titled Build a Better Business Case for UC, research firm Forrester offers a list of fears reported by the C-suite at 133 enterprises across the US and Europe regarding implementing UC services. Here it is below (complete with our own observations):

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IT Needs to Get Off Its Butt And Start Teaching UC

Communication between a company’s IT department and the rest of the organization is often fragmented. We all accept that this is the norm because techies do one thing and everyone else does another. Sales, marketing, operations – they all basically require you to be human. IT requires you to be smart too. Which is why we applaud them for what they do. But every once in a while, the communication barrier between IT and the rest of the organization begs to be lifted.

In every company, big or small, there comes a point when the geeks need to come down from up above (or climb out of their basement) and hold a good old-fashioned training session. In the Unified Communications game, that time is now!

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Communication & Collaboration: Arts That Leaders Need to Master

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I recently stumbled upon some lectures that talk about communication & collaboration in business, explaining its crucial role in leveling the field for executives and floor employees alike, driving successful operations across an entire organization. They were great reads and I want to lay out some bullet points for our readers. If you own a business, listen up!

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IDG: Demand For Collaboration Software Poised to Explode Within The Next Year

A few days ago, data group IDG Enterprise rolled out a lengthy report coupled with an infographic to show the state of UC&C (Unified Communications & Collaboration) today, with an eye on the next 12 months.

The research conducted by the enterprise technology media company revealed that data transformation continues to climb a steep hill, but that the UC&C sector in particular is making an innovative leap. Best of all, “organizations are recognizing the value that sits within these solutions,” according to Brian Glynn, chief revenue officer of IDG Enterprise.

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Dare To Disagree: When Contradiction Gives Birth To True Collaboration [Video]

When we designed Hubgets, we wanted not only to facilitate communication, but also to foster collaboration in all-new ways. We’re still ironing out some bugs, but already our newborn baby enables entire teams to send feedback back and forth, collaborate on projects, aggregate searchable data, and keep their peers in the loop even out of office.

In our awareness spree to make Hubgets known far and wide, we came across a TED talk by Margaret Effernan which speaks of the hidden power of contradiction as a crucial aspect of collaboration.

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How To Get Your End-Users To Hop Aboard The UC Bandwagon

Planning to sell Unified Communications (UC) to your end users? Don’t expect them to get too excited right away. Moving them from traditional voice systems to the world of IP may be exciting for you, but the basic components of voice gateways, core processing servers, and IP phones do not, in and of themselves, offer value to your employees. So, what’s the key to revving up your employees and ensuring optimal buy-in?

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Education Is Key When Building a Collaborative Culture

Driving adoption of anything within an organization is difficult enough, because people tend to resist change. Even more so when it comes to all-new collaboration tools. So how do you ensure their buy-in and ongoing support for the tech? Easy. With some good old fashioned education.

We should know

It’s crucial not to take deployment lightly. We say this from experience. If you hand the management department a flimsy brochure or a demo video that just scratches the surface of the product, it might do more harm than good. Sometimes higher-ups may be even more resilient in the face of change than the workforce on the ground floor. When it comes to communication & collaboration tools, knowing the numerous benefits of each feature in part lets you align those features perfectly with your business.

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How Mobility Will Enhance Your Contact Center

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When you hear contact center agent, the first thing that pops to mind is an employee confined to a cubicle with a PC and a headset. However, these days, that same job can be practiced out in the open with a cell phone. And starting this year, the practice is gaining some well deserved traction.

It’s not just the contact center staff that needs newer, more versatile tools to get their job done. The same goes for knowledge workers, roaming experts, back-office personnel, part-time or overflow agents, and even account managers. Everyone must collaborate to tackle customer issues, or to take full advantage of opportunities as they arise. However, for customer-facing employees it’s critical to have the flexibility to take calls anywhere, anytime, and on any device.

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Technology To The Rescue! Inefficient Collaboration Can (and Will) Endanger Your Business

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Lately, everybody speaks about how you can increase productivity with better collaboration. Let’s think about how we are used to work together: in-person meetings, one-on-one discussions, phone calls that never end etc. Remember those days when, if you stepped away from your desk phone for just a few minutes, you had every chance to miss a business opportunity, or play phone tag for the remainder of the day?! Well, not anymore.

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