The Big Shift in Communications

Business communications should be strategic to an organization’s competitiveness, but too often it is just a cost of doing business. No business has historically argued that its success was the result of proper selection of its phone system. That’s why it is time to rethink communications.

Phone systems are out! The alternatives are varied, but generally offer broader and more empowering capabilities that promote collaboration among colleagues as well as enhanced interaction with customers, partners and suppliers.

What changed? In a word, everything. The entire model of how businesses buy and consume communications, the underlying technologies and fundamental business requirements are all radically changing. When it comes to communications, ‘business as usual’ no longer applies. These changes are not minor or incremental, but reflect a totally different approach to how business gets done.

In the past, the PBX was a proprietary solution for voice communications. Despite a multitude of choices in vendors, dealers and features, most PBX-type systems operated in essentially identical ways. Many organizations admit having selected their PBX based on the look and feel of the handsets. That was hardly the way to make a long-term capital purchase, but realistically, many businesses gave up because the myriad of options made communications overwhelming and confusing. As long as business got done, choosing a system felt like a fruitless exercise. It’s a good thing a better approach now exists.

This paper explains both UC and the attraction to the cloud or specifically UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service). Hosted communications is the only communications sector experiencing recent, consistent, year-over-year growth. The model offers businesses operational, financial and technical advantages. UCaaS offers a transformation in business communications and collaboration. There’s a lot of change taking place, and it is good news for business enterprises.

White Paper sponsored by Simple Signal, 2012.