TMCnet Unified Communications Week in Review

One thing is for sure in today’s competitive business landscape: if you don’t have a unified communications platform in place, it is likely your competitors will slowly but surely be taking away your customer base. Currently, consumers demand constant access to capabilities including instant messaging, call routing, Web and audio conferencing, and if they can’t use these solutions when partnering with you, it is likely they will soon be looking at other options that are available to them.

This week in the rapidly expanding UC space, Cisco’s (News - Alert) Collaboration and Security portfolio was highlighted, as it can seamlessly integrate presence, instant messaging (IM), voice and video, voice messaging, desktop sharing and conferencing into one, user friendly interface. All of these functions can be accessed via an array of devices such as PCs, Macs, tablets and smartphones.

 The company also powers a Video-as-a-Service offering that it hopes will bring video collaboration in the enterprise to an unparalleled level, in addition to making it much more cost-effective for business-to-business (B2B) communications.

In other news, BroadSoft (News - Alert) Inc. is putting a smile upon the faces of mobile operators with the release of its new suite. Named UC-One IMS, it enables network administers to only be required to have one subscription in place for an array of employee-related UC needs that will help to break up communication devices being leveraged by service subscribers for larger sized organizations.

“There is an undeniable enterprise shift currently underway from premise-based communications services to cloud-enabled mobile Unified Communications (News - Alert),” BroadSoft’s President and CEO, Michael Tessler, said, “and UC-One IMS powerfully extends the benefits of the cloud by enabling enterprises to manage a single communications service subscription for their employees, in turn driving down their telecommunications costs and management complexity. For mobile operators, UC-One IMS unlocks new revenue opportunities, and we believe this will shift the initial target market segment served by LTE (News - Alert) networks to enterprises from consumer, which means that mobile and converged operators can more quickly monetize their LTE network investments."

Closing out the week, it was revealed that many federal buyers of unified communications and collaboration solutions prefer the advantages a premises-based approach offers them as opposed to a cloud-based solution. However, over time, the Departments of Interior, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs to Homeland Security and Defense will reportedly turn to the cloud for the benefits it can offer.

Elements to closely consider when decided whether or not to migrate to the cloud include a shift in policies, disaster recovery mandates, deployment timeframes, the increasingly popular BYOD trend, risks that can potentially arise during the transition, and making the overall management of the system more simplistic for operators.

To read the full report, click here.

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