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Jabra Shows How the Cloud Reshapes Unified Communications

By John Casaretto
Contributing Writer

The cloud is a force for change, especially when it is introduced to the world of business. Every day there are more and more use cases combining the cloud and business uses. In the world of unified communications, the combination of these two are in a state of explosion at this time, and this is changing things forever. Jabra's blog points to this cloud-unified communications relationship in a recent post. In it, the company breaks down the developments in a way that relates to the industry at large.

The first thing that Jabra observes is the rise of "as a Service" that is happening around the industry. If it sounds consistent with the introduction of all cloud services, that's because it is the exact same notion that lies underneath it. This point is important however, because it is a shift from traditions in unified communications. This is an industry that has made giant moves from old phone systems, to advanced onsite platforms, and now has to consider the power of cloud-based options which essentially minimizes the tasks of management, deployment, security and more. IT infrastructure is increasingly being delivered as a service, and unified communications is another territory to conquer.

Breaking down the various elements of cloud and unified communications, Jabra (News - Alert) describes Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which allows companies to utilize the hardware resources of a cloud provider such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace (News - Alert), GoGrid, and so on. Next, Platform as a Service (PaaS) is reviewed. PaaS allows companies to utilize pre-structured tools in the cloud to create their own applications. Microsoft's Azure and Google's App Engine are examples of this. Software as a Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) allows companies to essentially rent software that is provided by the cloud company. The application you need can be easily implemented and there's no development needed to be done by the client company. Things like SalesForce, Office 365, and Google (News - Alert) Docs are examples of SaaS.

These types of cloud services are reviewed in order to show how traditional unified communications is becoming Unified Communications (News - Alert) as a Service (UCaaS). Not to inundate the reader with acronyms, the significance is essential to the review. Models of computing have radically changed and unified communications is transforming. UCaaS is delivering flexibility, reliability, cost-effectiveness, and advanced integration models that were not possible without the cloud. The impact on business has been tremendous and there is a wide range of products that are solving problems and enabling companies to do things better using the power of the cloud.