Unified communications and voice have made a once-in-a-generation shift to the cloud. UCaaS, or Unified Communications as a Service, is quoted by Gartner as being the UC/voice platform for 90% of IT decision makers by 2021. The phone system that you currently own and operate today should be the last one that you ever buy. This article will outline 37 reasons why this change should be made if you remain unconvinced. For the buyers that have determined that UCaaS is the right road, you can use the points below to help guide your vendor decisions or simply reach out to C3 to have us run the vendor evaluation process.
- Because Gartner & Forrester is Telling you so
- Gartner - “By 2021, 90% of IT leaders will not purchase new premises-based UC infrastructure — up from 50% today — because future cloud UC offerings will be far ahead in terms of features, functions, portals, analytics and dashboards.”
- Forrester – “Our prior evaluation, “The Forrester Wave™: Unified Communications And Collaboration, Q3 2017,” assessed vendors that could span on-premises, hybrid, and some level of hosted or cloud delivery. While this represents a segment of the market, moving forward, the deployment model of choice will be UCaaS.”
- Because the Market is Telling you so
- Toshiba folded. Avaya bought Nortel, filed for bankruptcy, and then promptly turned to RingCentral for their cloud offering. Mitel and Shoretel combined when they didn’t move to the cloud fast enough. Cisco bought Broadsoft. At the same time, the number of UCaaS providers has increased 10x.
- Price Points Have Come Down Significantly
- You can’t run a UC and phone environment effectively for less than what you can purchase it for. If you are solely relying on costs quoted from websites, then reach out to someone like C3 Technology Advisors who has negotiated hundreds of price points for clients that are below online/marketed pricing.
- High Availability is Built in, no Need for DR
- You know how much HA costs in the world of cloud-based UC and contact center? $0. The UCaaS providers build in multiple instances of your UC environment throughout their network. We recently had a customer that had to procure $400k of Cisco hardware, $100k in professional services, $50k in Smartnet, and has to procure colocation space JUST to provide DR to their Cisco Call Manager and contact center (UCCE).
- UC Disaster Recovery Testing is Not Needed
- Your IT staff doesn’t need to pull the plug once every 6 months on a Saturday to test survivability.
- Ease of Setting up Remote Workers
- On-prem solution – each remote worker must set up a vpn back to headquarters, then is routed to the on-prem solution, then rides a SIP or PRI channel for an outbound call.
- UCaaS – remote user authenticates directly to the cloud based UCaaS provider.
- Compliance
- On-premise solutions require YOU to ensure the compliance of your platform. Instead, why not just pick a cloud-based UC solution that is already compliant with whatever your needed compliance is? Why give yourself more work? For example, if you operate Cisco Call Manager for users in Europe, how exactly do you accomplish GDPR compliance? This can be tough to answer, let alone remedy. With several UCaaS international providers, GDPR compliance is built in.
- E911
- E911 regulations in the US and around the world are becoming arduous. E911 functionality is built into the vast majority of UCaaS providers’ solutions. On-premise solutions typically need more hardware or a 3rd party solution. E911 lawsuits stemming from an inability to effectively call 911 and locate victims can have disastrous consequences. Treat E911 without the care it needs at your own risk.
- No More PRIs
- No more SIP. No more POTS lines. Throughout the world from telecom providers that are burdensome to deal with. Dial tone is built into UCaaS. Therefore...
- Less bills to receive, pay, and inspect(at least 50% of telco bills are inaccurate).
- Less NOCS for your IT staff to deal with.
- Less contract renegotiations for all of those telco services.
- No More SIP Troubleshooting
- SIP troubleshooting is a nightmare that typically ends with your SIP carrier and PBX provider pointing fingers at each other. With UCaaS, there is none of that finger-pointing as the UCaaS provider owns both components.
- Dear CIO, why tax your IT department with PBX/UC management?
- Why not have them work on higher value priorities? With UCaaS, your IT department no longer has to manage physical PBX equipment, virtual components, operating systems, etc.
- No Customer Site Gateways Needed
- SRST and SRST routers aren’t needed any more. Save the cost and hassle of having to purchase, program, maintain, backup phone system solutions.
- Text Capabilities
- UCaaS providers can give you the ability to send and receive SMS texts to cell phones right from their desktop or mobile user UCaaS portal. Use cases
- Increase your collections department’s effectiveness. Most collections calls to end customers aren’t picked up and voicemails are not returned. Texting is a much less obtrusive tactic for collecting over-due invoices. Many people don’t even pick up phone calls anymore. Allowing your collections department to text clients AND track that communication will increase your ability to collect debts.
- Send company-wide messages.
- Warn employees in an active shooter situation.
- Concerned that your employees send and receive company information over personal cell phones? Are there data leakage concerns? Compliance concerns? With UCaaS texting, this information stays in an environment that your IT staff can control. If a user leaves, their ability to access those texts are eliminated. This is not the case if that same user used their personal cell phone to send and receive business texts.
- Fax Capabilities
- Send and receive faxes securely right from a desktop portal. Third party fax servers, POTS lines, and fax machines are no longer needed.
- Fax Safety
- Instead of faxes sitting on fax machines that allow anyone in the office to pick up potentially confidential information, faxes can be received through a secure portal.
- Ala Carte Contact Center Offerings
- Complex contact center offerings can be had on a person by person basis. I’ll use Cisco as an example. If users want enterprise contact center functionality, you HAVE to buy Unified Communications Enterprise along with a big price tag. In the on-demand cloud offerings of our providers, this functionality can be had by as few as 1 user.
- Up to Date Software Versions are Included & are Automatically Applied
- Organizations utilizing UCaaS are always up to date with the latest features, functionality, security updates, etc.
- Security
- When you have an on-premise UC/phone environment, it’s up to you to secure it. And there are plenty of vulnerabilities to secure against. In the world of UCaaS, security is provided by the UCaaS provider. With a Cisco call manager solution, there are currently 190 vulnerabilities that have been identified that you need to protect against - see full list here.
- Some of our clients have had their PBXs hacked and have been on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of international calls. With UCaaS, this risk does not exist.
- Power Reduction
- You don’t have servers powering your phone and contact center anymore. Therefore, your power bill is reduced.
- Much Simpler Site Moves
- On-premise solution – You’ll start by ordering new telco services for the new site(and no telecom company has ever screwed that up before...). This is followed move the edge/gateway device on a Saturday to the new site. This is followed by a coordinated cutover of the gateway and the porting of service from one location to another. Next, E911 configurations at a router and service provider level have to change.
- UCaaS – unplug phones at old location, plug in phones at new location, update E911.
- New Locations are Easy to Spin up
- Get internet connection, buy phones (or just download soft clients), procure phone numbers online. That’s it.
- Eliminate Costly Professional Services
- Since the brains of your UC solution is in the cloud, you don’t need a CCIE charging hundreds of dollars per hour for configuration changes, upgrades, etc. (Your trusty VAR is making a lot of money on these services.)
- Licensing Simplicity
- On premise solutions involve licensing gateways/SBCs, call managers, voicemail, web conferencing, audio conferencing, etc. With UCaaS, users choose typically between 3 seat options at a fixed cost. That’s it. It’s that easy.
- Eliminate Smartnet for On-Premise Gear
- Scalability
- On-premise UC servers have limits on the number of users. If your organization has 500 employees and you buy an on-prem solution that supports 1,000 users, you have to upgrade or rip out the old solution. Conversely, if your organization goes through a downsizing from 500 to 200 people, then that 1,000-user system is now over-specc’d.
- Predictable Spending
- Each seat is a fixed cost. The typical UCaaS bill doesn’t vary greatly month to month.
- Local & Long-Distance Usage is Included in the Cost of a Seat
- No more having to negotiate these rates and inspecting bills to ensure accuracy.
- Audio Conferencing Cost Elimination
- Why use a stand-alone audio-conferencing service when this service is typically bundled in to UCaaS?
- Web Conferencing Cost Elimination & Platform Consolidation.
- Zoom, Webex, and GoToMeeting are expensive and oftentimes our enterprise clients use several platforms. Web Conferencing is typically bundled in to UCaaS licenses/seat and those expenses can be eliminated.
- Protect Your Revenue
- If your most important customers communicate with your salespeople using their personal cell phones and those salespeople leave your company for a competitor, guess what happens? Your customers may continue to call that salesperson and you may lose sales. Instead, give each of your salespeople a single company owned phone number that rings both their business phone and cell phone. If this employee leaves your company, you can simple redirect incoming calls to another salesperson.
- End User Management
- On-prem solutions often require clunky UIs and require an administrator to make simple changes using CLI.
- Most UCaaS solutions have elegant GUI UIs and allow end users to easily make changes.
- End to End Performance Management
- Detailed performance metrics for every phone call can be had simply and quickly.
- A sales manager wants to know how many calls a sales rep makes in a given month? No problem.
- IT wants to evaluate problems with a specific at home users experiencing quality issues? Simple. Just pull up the call records and use the easily accessible information about that call to troubleshoot.
- Conversation Transcription
- One UCaaS provider’s base UCaaS product will transcribe every call within a department or across the entire organization and provide a heat map on key terms. Wouldn’t it be nice if you receive a report on the most commonly used words in conversations with clients that discontinued purchasing your companies’ goods and services?
- Integrations
- Want a plug-in for Salesforce, Slack, GSuite, Office365, and many others? Most UCaaS carriers provide this at no additional cost.
- Make Your Users More Self-Sufficient
- Many UCaaS portals allow users to manage day to day items that will free up your staff to focus on more important and higher value duties.
- Employee Recruitment & Retention
- There are dozens of studies that show that the recruitment and retention of employees is better when those employees are provided with top-notch technology.
- Worker Efficiency
- Having tools like click-to-dial, collaboration on demand, desktop faxing, SMS, and advanced conferencing without leaving your desk at the office or at home makes your workers more efficient.
When you are ready to evaluate the broad spectrum of UCaaS providers, don’t just call salespeople and Google “Best UCaaS vendors”. Work with the consultants at C3 who advise you on the right vendors for you, with pre-negotiated price points often not available to end customers.
Contact us here.