Vendor Landscape: Unified Communications as a Service
UC in the cloud never looked so good. Today, communication means collaboration. And collaboration is good for business.
- While core telephony remains important, many organizations are looking at unified communication (UC) technologies to enhance productivity and improve collaboration.
- Vendors offer a range of capabilities in their UC offerings in addition to basic IP telephony (IPT) capabilities, from basic presence, instant messaging, and mobility features to video conferencing, content sharing, collaboration platforms, and multimedia recording and analytics.
- This research isolates key vendor strengths and challenges, and provides resources to help accelerate your selection process.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- UC features and capabilities differ less and less between vendor offerings as the product matures further, but still organizations should choose carefully to ensure they are getting the features, reliability, usability, and architecture they need, without paying for unnecessary features.
- Implementing a UC solution within the context of a broad communication and collaboration strategy (including video conferencing systems and collaboration environments) offers the greatest opportunity to improve productivity and streamline critical business processes by minimizing communication bottlenecks.
- UC features deliver invaluable flexibility, helping to support trends with bring your own device (BYOD) and increased teleworking.
- The cloud is here and UC as a service (UCaaS) is a more viable option than ever before with more promise for return. Take a hybrid approach if you can’t give up the on-premise infrastructure yet and realize the value of UCaaS.
Impact and Result
- Quickly develop a shortlist of vendors that offer solutions covering the entire spectrum of UC requirements.
- Be confident that the right potential partners are being considered to meet current and future UC needs.
About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
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Get the help you need in this 3-phase advisory process. You'll receive 3 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.
Guided Implementation 1: Shortlist Assistance and Requirements
- Call 1: Get off to a productive start: Discuss the market space and how vendors are evaluated. Decide which platform suits you best and narrow down the options based on customized requirements.
Guided Implementation 2: RFP and Budget Review
- Call 1: Interpret and act on RFP results: Review vendors’ RFPs and ensure the solution will meet your needs. Discuss average pricing of solutions and what can fit into your budget.
Guided Implementation 3: Negotiation and Contract Review
- Call 1: Purchase optimization: Review contracts and discuss best practices in negotiation tactics to get the best price for your solution.
Contributors
- Hughes Telephone Inc.
- Dixie Lumber Company
- Three anonymous contributors
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