Switching To Full-Spectrum Communications
What Is Full-Spectrum Communications & Why Is It Right For Your Business?
Business communications used to be relatively simple. Companies were able to expand their basic communications needs by provisioning a new line to their PBX, adding a new email address, and dropping off a desk phone and a computer to the new employee’s cubicle. Everyone worked in the same building from nine to five. Today’s business environment is much more complex. Not only have most companies shifted to fully or mostly remote due to the coronavirus pandemic, but companies may also have multiple offices and employees scattered across the globe—all of whom need to function as a single unit.
Businesses depend on remote workers who must be able to get work done at home or on the road. These workers use their mobile devices as often as they use the phone on their desk. Salespeople who are constantly on the road need the same services as those in the office, such as access to voicemail and fax. Employees need to be reachable whether they are working from home, at a client site, or at headquarters. Videoconferences often need to be scheduled with just a few minutes' notice - frequently without knowing how many people will join the call. Today’s companies need a boost in capabilities when it comes to their communications systems, but they also need to control costs.
Unified Communications (UC) solutions allow companies to incorporate different modes of communications into one toolset, working alongside or entirely replacing their legacy systems. UC features include telephony services, presence monitoring, and management, call forwarding, chat, voicemail, unified messaging, and audio and video conferencing.
Today’s UC systems are designed with four major goals in mind:
? Increased productivity: By having access to a full feature set of communications tools regardless of their location, workers can remain highly productive. For example, employees can use features like Find Me / Follow Me to locate mobile co-workers without having to dial multiple numbers, text, and messages.
? Collaboration: Employees can use conferencing, screen sharing, and whiteboarding capabilities to communicate in real-time, regardless of location. In the past, the same level of collaboration could only happen in the boardroom.
? Mobility: Workers are increasingly mobile, using smartphones and tablets to work on the go. Regardless of whether they are in a hotel room across the country or in a coffee shop down the street, workers need to stay connected. UC naturally lends itself to a highly mobile workforce.
? Cost savings: By investing in one platform with numerous solutions instead of individual services that solve a single part of the equation, UC systems can offer considerable savings over legacy solutions. Many companies are taking these benefits a step further and embracing another major trend: cloud computing. As more and more applications move to the cloud, it’s a natural evolution to look at the cloud for UC services as well.
The Cloud Changes Everything
UC as a Service (UCaaS) refers to the delivery of communication and collaboration applications and services by a third-party service provider over an IP network. UCaaS solutions provide high levels of availability, flexibility, and scalability for core communications functions. There are a few approaches to UCaaS such as:
? Single-tenancy: An architecture in which a single customer uses a single instance of a software application and/or the infrastructure that supports it.
? Multi-tenancy: Several businesses share a single software platform.
? Full Spectrum Communications: Some providers place a physical box on-premise and deliver UC applications in the cloud. Others provide SIP trunks to existing on-premise PBX systems. Star2Star’s unique Full Spectrum solutions combine pure and on-premises systems with a suite of cloud-based services—hosted at highly-reliable, redundant data centers—to create a complete, feature-rich communications system.
? Reduced risk of obsolescence: With a UCaaS solution, your service provider often is responsible for maintenance and upgrades, granting you access to the latest technology updates available.
? Reduced costs: Deploying UC as a cloud-based service allows businesses to reduce capital expenditures related to purchasing on-premises equipment. The ability to reallocate capital to key internal projects without jeopardizing the company’s communications requirements is very financially attractive.
With a UCaaS model, businesses can move their administrative responsibilities to a service provider that can centralize all the tasks. The data can be accessed and information communicated without time and location constraints, which improves the reliability of the system and saves time.
Finding The Right Solution To Leverage The Cloud
Once the decision is made to pursue a UCaaS solution, it’s important to partner with a service provider that not only matches your overall business requirements but is flexible enough to scale with you and meet your business’ growing needs. Some hosted solutions can only handle call quality at small, single locations, and some on-premises solutions are only financially viable for large enterprises. Many providers aren’t flexible enough to offer solutions that combine the best of on-premises and cloud technologies. In addition, just as SMBs have different requirements than large enterprises, a company in the fashion industry needs different features and capabilities than a financial services firm. Therefore, providers must be able to adapt and mold to the needs of their clients.
It’s important to find the right match for your company by examining all solution options from a variety of different angles. For example, how will a solution meet the specific needs of a certain department as well as the requirements of the organization as a whole?
Service providers should be able to answer the following questions for customers:
1. How easy is it to manage my UC applications in the cloud? Management of applications is one of the biggest time drains for IT when it comes to UC solutions. Framework views that show performance, usage, and other metrics can help ensure you align technology investments with business objectives. Adding users, changing access, and other functions should be intuitive.
2. How responsive is your customer support? Customer support should be available 24/7 to help you through every aspect of the service, including on-site delivery, deployment, and support of service- level agreements (SLAs).
3. How flexible are your solutions? If you require customization, will the service provider be able to accommodate in a cost-effective manner?
4. What is your strategy for disaster recovery and business continuity? Networks should be highly reliable and redundant.
5. Can I integrate with other applications? Applications like Salesforce.com are prevalent; solutions must “play nicely” with other applications and support easy and cost-effective integration of third-party APIs.
Making A Business Case
Businesses today are looking to reduce both expense and complexity in their communications tools, but many have limited budgets for dedicated IT staff and need to focus their resources on their primary business. UCaaS allows companies to offload significant upfront capital expenditures, and reduce or eliminate the time and effort spent on installation, maintenance, troubleshooting, and updating equipment. It also centralizes management functions and helps assure business continuity in the face of a disaster or outage. All of these characteristics confirm that UCaaS eliminates not just equipment costs, but OPEX costs as well.
When selecting a UCaaS provider, companies need to perform their due diligence, which includes mapping out the features and capabilities needed. There are many models available in today's marketplace, ranging from hosted solutions to on-premises systems. Full Spectrum solutions allow a business to choose the deployment, add-ons, supporting hardware, and customizations to create the ideal system for their needs and workflows. Which option is best varies based on the speed and reach of the company’s vision, as well as its desire to fully enable business applications. Understanding the flexibility of the provider’s pricing, leasing, and financing options is also critical.