As UC and UCaaS solutions become an integral part of the communications landscape in businesses of all sizes, we sit down with senior engineer Matt Morris who gives us his informed perspective. In the first of a regular series, Matt talks about how UC is the overnight success story that was more than 20 years in the making.
These days, with the availability of the internet connecting infrastructure to the person, I like to say unified communications (UC) is essential for delivering all the “anys”. And by this I mean delivering communication anywhere, anytime, anyplace on any device.
As the main components of a UC solution include voice calling, messaging, and video conferencing, UC is everything to do with smoothing how your people work together or apart, how they collaborate or work in isolation, participate in meetings and share information. UC paves the way for better productivity from an enhanced user experience and improved service delivery for a better customer experience.
Adopting a suite of fully featured communication tools allows your people to communicate freely and intuitively whether they are in the office, at home, or somewhere in between. And for ease of use and a better user experience, it makes sense for these tools to be unified and work together. Otherwise, your people need to constantly jump from different systems and different tools on different devices. With so many communications tools and technologies available to support your people in their work, a unified communications solution solves this challenge by bringing multiple disparate channels of communication together.
UC is tailor made for a hybrid work world
But for many enterprises UC was long considered as the icing on the cake – more of a nice to have rather than a fundamental business solution. While the roots of a robust UC solution stems back to the late 1990s, it took the emergence of a worldwide pandemic to bring UC to the fore in businesses around the world. During the time of COVID-19, the maturity of the unified communications application suite was such that it was ready and able to be switched on in an instant to support business continuity in a whole new work-from-home and then hybrid work world.
With companies adopting unified communications applications en masse and seeing the value in real-time during their time of urgent need, the case for unified communications as an essential tool was cemented and it’s changed the mindset in enterprises everywhere. Now considered an essential part of the business communications toolkit, adoption has accelerated by a country mile.
With it, the market has moved on from questioning the value of investing in unified communications to identifying which particular flavour of UC is the best fit for your organisation?
In my next post, I’ll discuss the different options available to companies when investing in UC. The right solution for your business depends solely on your unique business needs.
Free UC download
For more information on unified communications, download our free white paper: A CEO’s Guide to Unified Communications. If you want to talk to Matt and the team at imei about adopting UC to address your company’s unique needs, please get in touch.
