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 Top Features Your UC Provider Should Have

1. Introduction

   Although VoIP can be considered as the foundation for modern UC solutions, the idea of UC is far more encompassing. 
   UC is about integrating real-time and non real-time communications to give users a consistent, integrated unified user interface and experience across all employed devices.
   Currently, there are two types of UC deployments available to businesses – on premise and cloud-native. When it comes to flexibility and scalability, the UC-as-a-service, cloud-based model offers significant advantages in terms of reduced cost and greater business agility.
   However, not all UCaaS solutions are alike. We’ve created a list of the top features you should look for in a UCaaS solutions provider to make sure you’re getting the most out of your money.

2. Importance of the As-A-Service Model 

   IT departments often face tight budgets and staff with limited expertise
   Implementing full scale on-premise UC solution or migrating an on-premise solution to the cloud is more complicated than just installing a traditional VoIP architecture; for many businesses this is a barrier to entry to adopting UC. 
   In fact, 50% of all cloud migrations fail. The as-a-service approach, including IaaS, to UC is critical to enabling businesses to adopt the UC tools and features they need without worrying about concerns related to underlying infrastructure. This lets them concentrate their limited IT resources on other areas.
   For service providers looking to sell UC solutions to end-users, a provider offering IaaS and UCaaS capabilities also empowers them to keep control over their profitability models. In fact, the IDC reports 80% of service provider revenues are above infrastructure. 

3. Mobility

   The modern workforce is incredibly mobile. By 2020, 72% of the American workforce will be mobile. Harvard Business Review has also found that mobile workers are 14% more productive than their always at-desk counterparts.
   Work is a space, not a place. The trend to mobility also ties into the Bring-Your-Own-Device trend. Digital natives are looking for communications tools that can work with the device of their choosing, whether it’s the VoIP deskphone or smartphones and tablets.
   Enterprises and the service providers that serve them need UCaaS solutions that offer mobile applications to extend VoIP functionality beyond the landline or desktop. This is important for end-users to enjoy a consistent experience across all devices. 
   Good mobile applications should include features like voice-to-text voicemail transcription, virtual attendants, seamless Wi-Fi/Cellular handoffs, the ability to move calls across devices, shared contacts and real-time user presence indications for coworkers.

4. Georedundancy and High Availability

   High availability is critical for IP-based communications. It’s the ability to communicate with anyone, anywhere at any time. Without it, companies can face decreased productivity, lost revenue, customer dissatisfaction and weakened market positions.
   To achieve HA, users need to be able to place and receive calls during peak times, planned device maintenance or unexpected failures.
   A UC solutions provider that employs geo-redundancy can provide significant benefits in this regard. Redundancy can ensure that call-processing systems are sufficiently reliable to handle the required number of users/devices while resilient in handling potential network or application outages.
   In an ideal scenario, multiple, geographically dispersed nodes share call processing and other IP communications loads. As a result, the nodes provide seamless failover capabilities, eliminating a need to plan for downtime in case of system maintenance and providing superior disaster recovery/business continuity capabilities.  

5. Profitability Potential

   The next-generation features of modern UCaaS products provide significant benefits to businesses but only if they are affordable.
   For end-user enterprises and service providers, many UC providers offer restrictive pricing models that constrain the ability to scale and grow while maintaining profitability.
   Under the traditional seats-based approach, enterprises and service providers must pay additional licensing fees for every new employee or customer they add to the platform. This creates ongoing, surmounting marginal costs that can prove to be a barrier to UCaaS adoption.
   With a sessions or concurrent calls-based approach, enterprises and service providers can use each license for multiple end-users. That provides added financial business agility to the benefits UC features already provide.

6. COMPANY Approach

   At COMPANY, we offer an award-winning UCaaS platform, SOLUTION, that satisfies all these important features, providing our enterprise users and service provider customers with a powerful way to grow revenue and tap new markets.
   To learn more, contact us.