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Find someone else to untangle your comms

Streamlining made easy

Make a plan

UCaaS providers are popping up all over. Perhaps more importantly, many of the world's telcos are getting in on the game directly. So long as the data retention and regulatory compliance issues can be dealt with, outsource it to the pros.

As a general rule, UCaaS providers will be better at doing the tech side than internal teams. It is all they do, all the time, and they do it for multiple clients.

Telcos, if they are your UCaaS provider of choice, are much better at negotiating with other telcos than anyone else out there because those sorts of negotiations are something they have to do for their services to function at all.

While UCaaS makes complex UC integration simple, however, it requires careful consideration before you take the plunge. Like most UC projects, it will probably mean abandoning some or all of your communications infrastructure. This will require planning, phased migrations and more planning.

Regulatory restrictions may require that your email and instant messenger servers be hosted on your premises. This requires a UCaaS provider willing to work around such restrictions and typically means finding one that caters to enterprise customers.

Consider the existing computers and mobile phones you have deployed. Will the UCaaS offering work with the operating systems and handsets you have in the field? If not, upgrading and migrating them will be part of the costs to consider.

UCaas providers typically work on an operating expenditure basis so you will be charged per-user per-month. This should be more palatable than swallowing the capital expenditure upfront.

Survival tactic

I couldn't do my job without UC. I don't work in an office, I work from home. There are only five people in my company but we work in five different locations and we frequently go to other countries.

My five-man company has the same sort of communications problems as a distributed global enterprise. For us, UC is not a matter of simple convenience: it is a necessity if our businesses are to survive.

We can’t simply pop down the hall, poke our head round someone's door and occupy them until whatever it is we need done is done. We lack a corporate local area network to pass files back and forth or even a meeting room in which to catch up on what everyone is doing each week.

Given the small size of my organisation, we couldn't operate without UCaaS. We don't have time to fiddle about with communications software and settings so we simply outsource it.

If we, with five people and IT staff who have fully implemented several UC solutions in the past, don't have time to keep up with the maintenance of a UC system I can't understand how a global enterprise with thousands of employees can do it.

It would require a body of staff dedicated just to keeping the communications system running, and they would probably get so bogged down with change requests that it would be next to impossible to keep up to date with the latest innovations in the field

I have worked with companies that can't get a video conference set up, and companies that can't get home users included in a phone call without pushing so many buttons that they seem to be dialling the moon.

Now that UCaaS is cheap and easily available my company doesn't have to be one of those. So what is holding your company back? Answers in the comments, please. ®

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