Unified Communications Featured Article

PanTerra Enhances Streams Team, UC Solution

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

PanTerra (News - Alert) Networks has upgraded its Streams service. Streams is a cloud-based file sync and share, team messaging, and UC offering. And now it also provides expanded reports, graphical analytics, improved mobility collaboration, and real-time and threshold notifications.

“With the new graphical analytics and reporting capabilities such as period over period comparison, companies can instantly spot trends and see potential areas of improvement in their business,” the company explains. “The user comparison capability allows managers to see how specific users are performing against company defined performance metrics in real-time. With SmartBox, Streams’ HIPAA secure unlimited cloud file sync and share service, companies have access to a lifetime of analytics data that they can review, compare and measure against.”

The company introduced its Streams team collaboration solution this spring. The rise of Slack prompted many UC solution providers to expand into team collaboration. For example, unified communications as a service specialist RingCentral in June of 2015 acquired team collaboration company Glip. And earlier this year 8x8 bought team collaboration outfit Sameroom.

Of course, these are just a few examples of the many recent acquisitions we’ve seen in the UC arena. Just last month Cisco (News - Alert) made a big move on this front with its announced plans to buy UC leader BroadSoft for $1.9 billion. Mitel in September completed its acquisition of fellow UC provider ShoreTel (News - Alert).

Last month Synergy Research Group came out with a new unified communications as a service market tracker. It listed RingCentral, 8x8, ShoreTel, and Vonage (News - Alert) as the UCaaS retail market leaders. It said BroadSoft, RingCentral, and Mitel are the UCaaS wholesale leaders. And it noted that Cisco, Mitel, and Avaya are the leaders of the cloud communications subset of the larger UCaaS category.

“UCaaS continues to provide a richer and more cost effective collaborative communication system for businesses globally,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy (News - Alert) Research Group’s founder and Chief Analyst. “We are also seeing an up-market acceleration of UCaaS adoption, moving from serving mostly smaller sized organizations now to gaining traction in businesses of over 100 seats and over 1,000 seats. Given that the displacement of premise PBXs remains low today, there is ample ground for UCaaS to find strong growth in displacing these legacy systems over a long stretch of time.”