Enhanced Mobility Prompted via Unified Communications

These days, it’s imperative that companies implement a unified communications platform to drive efficiency and quality within interactions ranging from employees to consumers, and among the workforce in general.

Not only can UC eliminate costs associated with maintaining a large office – as workers can now complete time-sensitive tasks on-the-go – but it is also an extremely flexible and resilient technology allowing companies to place a much heavier emphasis on operations, as opposed to managing a phone system.

The “marriage” of mobility and unified communications is driven by the proliferation of an assortment of devices including smartphones, tablets, PCs and laptops being continuously introduced into corporate infrastructure.

And the fact that next-generation products enable users to leverage video conferencing, instant messaging and other applications is also helping fuel the rapid adoption of these solutions.

In a recent blog post from unified communications provider Teo, the company stated, “Unified communications vendors are quickly expanding their offerings into the mobile landscape in an attempt to meet ongoing demand.

Ultimately, however, the market is driven by the endpoints that are being used in the workplace.”

While mobility and UC may have once been looked at as separate, they have now merged, allowing firms to see a much more productive employee base and drive customer satisfaction.

"The merging of mobility and UC has been an enormous trend, primarily because there are more and more calls made on mobile devices," added Paul DeBeasi, research vice president at Gartner (News - Alert). "Unified communications really began with traditional telephony in the enterprise and softphones on laptops. The vendors have evolved solutions over years and developed sophisticated UC clients for mobile devices."

As the unified communications market currently boasts a compound annual growth rate of nearly 13 percent that is estimated to continue through 2015, several obstacles can sometimes to get in the way of organizations seeing the various advantages associated with leveraging UC right away.

One of those factors is interoperability.

In order to overcome this hurdle once and for all, it’s essential that businesses implement industry-wide mandates that will enable enterprises to get this robust system up and running in as little time as possible.

In the future, “I see businesses moving from voice only to UC, much in the same way smartphones have replaced simple cellular voice only phones. UC will be absolutely commonplace in five years, and there will be more and more solution interworking available,” concluded Thomas Beck, director of Marketing and Business Development, Teo.

Want to learn more about SIP Trunking and how to integrate it into your current UC strategy? Don’t miss the SIP Trunking- UC Seminars in South San Francisco on November 27, 2012.