what is ucaas?
Telephony is moving to the cloud at a rapid pace. Legacy hardware vendors are losing steam at a record pace as enterprises opt to shift these workloads to the cloud. Premise-based vendors, such as Cisco, Avaya and Mitel, have seen their sales drastically decline and this trend will continue into the future. We're experiencing a shift in the market as consumers and vendors align with the common goal of adopting cloud communications as the primary methodology for all verticals, from SMB to enterprise. Premise-based vendors announcing end of life/end of support for numerous platforms has advanced the migration to UCaaS.
UCaaS shifts ownership of infrastructure, software and support to the vendor. As a customer, you will be consuming a true SaaS (software as a service) model. This shifts care and feeding to the vendor, while granting web portal access to your team for management, reporting and provisioning new users. This is a true co-managed solution with support baked into each license.
Gartner
Gartner defines UCaaS as,
Unified communications as a service (UCaaS) is a cloud-delivered unified communications model
Gartner further defines that UCaaS includes six communication functions:
Enterprise telephony
Meetings (audio/video/web conferencing)
Unified messaging
Instant messaging and presence (personal and team)
Mobility
Communications-enabled business processes
You can find Gartner's definition here.
Benefits of UCaaS
Redundancy - UCaaS vendors provide multi-tenancy, meaning your application lives in multiple datacenters. Should your primary datacenter fail, you will automatically failover to your backup site. There will be a brief operational impact, but service will be retained. This model is far superior to most premise-based solutions.
No FTE's - You don't need a full time employee to managed UCaaS. The vendor is responsible for the infrastructure, software, support and all care and feeding of these elements. Repurpose your resources to focus on tasks that bring greater value to your organization.
Agility - Users can utilize this application from any location, from the office, their home or on the road. UCaaS truly extends full enterprise functionality to all users regardless of their location. UCaaS also allows your organization to scale at speed. Simply provision a new user with a few clicks in the admin portal and you're off the races!
Bundle services - UCaaS allows you to bundle services, such as PBX, SMS, chat, call recording, fax, meetings and more. There are natural economic effieciencies that your organization can take advantage of as a result.
Resiliency - What happens if your primary connection is severed? Your UCaaS application will likely be defined as a critical workload and you can simply prioritize this traffic over your backup connection, which can be as simple as broadband or LTE. Select vendors also offer a gateway solution for survivability that allows internal communications and external access should your primary/secondary connections fail.
Advanced Analytics and Reporting - UCaaS vendors have prioritized reporting as a crucial component of their solution. These analytics will give you granular insight regarding utilization and and performance.
Softphone vs Desk-phone
This is a common question. UCaaS can be consumed with a desk-phone, soft-client or both! UCaaS is truly a SaaS solution, so it's an application first. By utilizing soft-clients, your organization can avoid pricey hardware purchases.
Terms
You can consume UCaaS with monthly, quarterly, annual or upfront payment terms. You will likely be able to take advantage of price breaks for annual or upfront payment terms.
Conclusion
Due to shifts in the market by legacy traditional PBX vendors and business needs, you should consider a migration to UCaaS. If you're still on-prem, you can expect fewer feature-updates and diminished support as legacy vendors struggle to adopt to the new market.
I'd be happy to assist by providing a TCO/ROI tool that helps your organization realize the economic benefits of UCaaS while aligning your requirements to the vendor that meets your needs.
Y'all be good,
DB