Business communications are getting a do-over. Moving to the cloud is not a new concept anymore. However, there’s plenty to consider. Especially when you move business communications to the cloud.
Business communications are, by all means, the living breath of any organization. They can make or break a business. Especially today. The amount of information sharing is, by all means, unprecedented. And getting ahead is, in fact, staying relevant.
Studies show that Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) services represent a fast-growing segment in the broader cloud communications market. That’s not a surprise considering the increasing number of companies who expand their activities far from their traditional borders. But are their employees, especially Millennials, playing any role in this change? I’m a firm believer that this digital-native generation is fueling the change. And scientific facts seem to support this idea.
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Metaphorically speaking, Unified Communications (UC) solution vendors walk around carrying a long list of benefits for service providers who want to offer UC services for SMBs and other organizations (i.e. upgrade their business communication channels). The are many reasons and truth is this crusade against old technology is very justified. Any way you look at it, UC services, especially when hosted in the Cloud, knock the socks off any legacy phone network.
A call center is, in and of itself, a network of phones. Much of UC’s functionality actually originated in call centers. The only difference is that unifying these features enables Service Providers (SP) to take better advantage of resources with the end goal of increasing productivity and improving the customer service. So what better business to target with UC if not contact centers? And although every feature counts, it’s those that touch the customer directly that weigh the most
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Communication infrastructures established in the ’90s are becoming increasingly incompatible with today’s connected economy. When it takes too long for partners to connect, or to fulfill customer needs, you know there’s a problem somewhere. For every problem, there’s a solution.
Unified Communications (UC) was born out of the need to enable faster decision making, but also to make collaboration more efficient. UC merges real-time communications (voice, video, instant messaging) with real-time data (presence, file sharing), and we often end up using the term Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) to describe these solutions. Provided as-a-service, UC&C has a series of technical and financial advantages that make it a key asset for virtually any business today
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Calculating the true size of the Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) market has never been easy as many organizations are still operating a multi-vendor mix of communication and collaboration solutions, and so the data is scattered all over the place. However, there is one key area of UC&C that has shown steady growth over the years, and it’s poised to grow even more in the coming years.
IDC forecasts that UC&C services in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) are set to rise from $7.7 billion in 2012 to $11.7 billion in 2016, but more importantly that the main driver for this growth is mobile UC. Most other think tanks agree that mobility is arguably the fastest-growing component of UC&C. IDC, for its part, has calculated a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32% per year. However, the mobile UC ecosystem is still a fountain that sits largely untapped
Despite increased awareness about Unified Communications (UC) solutions, many businesses are slow to upgrade, or downright reluctant to do so. Reportlinker shares some numbers as part of a recent market analysis, and predicts a serious uptick in adoption over the next three years.
Compared to 2014, UC adoption in 2015 has not been considerably higher. In fact, some parts of the globe have fallen short of expectations, according to various market researchers, including the fine gents at IDC. But Reportlinker is optimistic about the next few years, projecting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.42 per cent for the global UC 2.0 services market over the period 2015-2019
The Unified Communications (UC) market is chock full of media meant to promote the use of technology for communication and collaboration. Overall, that’s a good thing. But the nature of the materials is often abstract, trading the human element for the tech jargon.
In reality, technology only assists the transmission of information, which can actually detrimental to communications in the absence of basic skills, such as friendliness, feedback, or eye contact (in the case of video calling). Below, we bust three myths about “good communication” that get tossed around in marketing materials, including counter-marketing ones
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Haunt is a good word because businesses who are still on the fence are losing money every second at the hand of their cloud-loving competitors. The reality is that cloud technology is no longer expensive, nor unsafe, and there’s always the option to
Want to stay relevant as machines gradually take over the world? Pick a job that can’t be automated. The work done by humans is getting systematically replaced by devices as time progresses and technology makes new leaps forward. It’s a fact of life that our society is all too familiar with. But there are still plenty of tasks that will be hard to replace by gadgets.
The jobs that machines fumble over are incidentally the same jobs that make life exciting. Choreographers, fire fighters, chiropractors, art directors, coaches, and many others can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that robots won’t render them irrelevant any time soon
The biggest roadblock in cloud adoption everywhere is said to be lack of knowledge at an executive level. Technologically speaking, business leaders don’t always know what’s good for them in the long term. Clinging to outdated systems and processes is a sure way get left behind. Worst of all, the finance sector doesn’t feel it needs any transformative effects whatsoever.
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