Posts Tagged Under: unified communications

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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Technology Delivers Only When You Ask The Right Questions

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Is the product that you’re about to deploy user friendly, interoperable, scalable? Is your company waiting for others to take the plunge to consider new technology safe or viable? Does the product require radical infrastructure modifications to be deployed? These are just some of the questions that need to be asked when scouring the market for Unified Communications & Collaboration solutions.

What is Unified Communications anyway? Ask ten different people and you’re likely to get ten different answers. The reality is that UC has been waiting on the launch pad for well over a decade, and yet only a handful of industries have managed to wrap their heads around it. How did they do it? Simple. By asking these questions before buying.

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How to Target E-Commerce Businesses with UC Services

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By connecting workers in efficient and intuitive ways, Unified Communications (UC) addresses many business challenges. Whereas UC was originally implemented simply to cut costs and ease IT administration by converging data and voice networks, it has evolved into a mission-critical resource for businesses across all industries as they struggle to enable comprehensive and seamless collaboration across platforms, systems, and devices.

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The UC Market: The Place Where Bad News Is Good News

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According to the “Enterprise Unified Communications and Voice Equipment” report by IHS Infonetics, global enterprise PBX revenue fell 6 percent in the first quarter of 2015 (year-over-year), as more and more businesses are said to have discovered the cloud.

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Here Is Why Schools Should Say YES to Unified Communications

For most of their existence, PBX phone systems have been reserved for large organizations due to the high cost of ownership and maintenance. Today, this blockade is a thing of the past, all thanks to the cloud. Through a Unified Communications (UC) platforms hosted in the cloud, users employ their service provider’s infrastructure, which reduces costs significantly and at the same time lifts the barrier for more types of organizations to adopt the technology.

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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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