Group of people in a presentation about enterprise collaboration.

Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) in Review

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Unified Communications as a Service, or UCaaS, continues to be a big part of the discussion when looking to provide Communication/Collaboration services for new companies. UCaaS is also included as organizations are contemplating on-prem refreshes and upgrades.

For decades, most organizations used some type of on-prem “phone system” calling, voicemail, perhaps some call routing, and maybe even some contact center functionality. As new services developed in the Collaboration space, these on-prem systems added this functionality. As more services were developed, the management and support complexity increased, and the compute and storage requirements became more intensive. As we all know, compute and storage does not last forever, so upgrades and refreshes are now part of the ongoing maintenance.

As a former CTO for a multi-billion dollar financial organization, I will always remember where the C-Level excitement level was for our “phone system,” but I can tell you how fast an outage was bubbled up to the C-Level team members. These services are critical!

The first iterations of UCaaS were not as feature-rich as the on-prem solutions, but that is changing. Calling, voicemail, call routing, contact center all standard, and now video, messaging, mobility, and integrations into core business applications are part of the offerings. We are getting somewhere! You now couple the services being up to speed, with the infrastructure being owned, maintained, and supported by your UCaaS provider. This is often a great alternative for organizations that are running lean IT. Also, the redundancy and scalability requirements are all part of the monthly subscription charge. Redundant data centers, compute, storage, network, and reporting are all taken care of by your UCaaS provider.

Another (and maybe unspoken) plus? Monthly subscription charges align with most accounting and finance teams. They like that consistent, repeatable cost model for this critical service. Upgrades cost money, new hardware costs money, and these capital expenditures disrupt the consistent, repeatable charges that are desired.

Final Thoughts on Unified Communications as a Service

Unified Communications as a Service is here to stay. The truth is traditional PBX systems are too expensive to maintain. Worse yet, they lack essential functionality for working remotely—something that 2020 taught many organizations about. In a future article, I will discuss Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS), as this is another area of complexity that we now have more options for. Like the UCaaS space, CCaaS is booming too!

Here at Greyson Technologies, Collaboration is in our DNA. There are many options to choose from and not all of them are created equal! Interested in learning more about how we can help you? Contact us today.