Unified Communications Week in Review

If you try to run a business in today’s competitive climate without the most up-to-date tools at your disposal, it is likely that you will soon be seeing disastrous results. In order to eliminate the chances of this scenario from happening and enable your company to expand over the long term, a robust unified communications (UC) system is now considered highly important.

Looking at major news made in the space just this week, recent survey results show that in spite of the fact that last year only 14 percent of IT professionals responded that they want to reduce costs related to IT storage, that number has risen by 20 percent in 2013. However, an interesting point to highlight here is that when attempting to transition to a virtualized environment, only 45 percent of IT professionals claim to have been dead-on in regards to how much it actually costs to store this key information. This in turn negatively impacted the operational costs of multiple companies.

As mobility is now being fully embraced within the enterprise environment, the requirement for various servers to hold this data is still there. Yet when implementing a UC platform, you can do and store much more while having less resources in place.

“By using various forms of unified communications, companies can control IT spending that can be reallocated to help provide more storage options,” a recent blog post from Teo stated.

In other news, BroadConnect Telecom has taken the steps needed to bring a variety of unified communications video services directly to its hosted PBX (News - Alert) customers. Yet in order to power this next-generation suite, the company first had to begin to leverage Polycom's desktop voice and video solutions.

 Combining its solution with Polycom’s (News - Alert), the organization as able to bring the level of support for its video offerings to a heightened level as well as offer users the option of choosing whether or not they want to use plug-and-play technology to power high quality video collaboration solutions.

Closing out the week, TMCnet Special Guest Art Rosenburg revealed, “The need for flexibility in business communications has always been driven primarily by end-user mobility. Legacy desktop communications handled such flexibility needs with separate and expensive voice and visual endpoints, connections and software applications. Multi-modal wireless smartphones and tablets have made UC enablement both necessary and practical. Now that such ubiquitous mobile devices can do almost everything that the desktop endpoints do and more, the BYOD question arises about the need for having different endpoints for an end user who may need both wired and wireless connections.”

Hence, as mobility continues to ramp up throughout global enterprises, UC is becoming increasingly important. In fact, the ShoreTel (News - Alert) Dock in conjunction with ShoreTel Mobility, is now assisting BYOD employees to transition their mobile smartphones and tablets into “portable PCs” that serve as multi-modal devices. This in turn gives users access to vital cloud-based applications that can improve the customer experience as well as drive productivity in or outside of the confines of the office.

For all of the most vital breaking news in the industry, be sure to stay tuned to the unified communications community, exclusively on TMCnet!