The rise and importance of UCaas

Global adoption of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) is rapidly on the rise and with Gartner and IDC predicting that the market share of businesses adopting Unified Communications is expected to double from 17% in 2018 to 35% in 2023, growth is not expected to slow down anytime soon.

This blog looks at some of the reasons why the UCaaS market continues to grow and highlights why more enterprises are increasingly adopting UCaaS platforms.

Shifting buying requirements

A huge driver of the exponential growth of UCaaS has been the rise in remote working, propelled by the pandemic. Organisations have had to quickly adopt a range of collaboration applications to support remote work and create a more agile, productive, and flexible business environment.

This shift to a ‘work-from-anywhere’ capability and an increased demand for collaboration, lends itself well towards UCaaS where vendors are constantly investing in tools, features and interoperability to maintain customer engagement.

With Gartner reporting that the number of remote workers will have doubled from pre-pandemic figures to over two-thirds of digital workers by 2023, UCaaS will continue to grow in importance by empowering employees to work effectively from any device within the corporate office or a remote location.

The Importance of Video Communications.

In line with the above, the use of phone systems is declining as one-to-one conversations are shifting to group conversations, meetings apps, team messaging or mobile devices. According to Metrigy’s global study on workplace collaboration, nearly 87% indicate video is a critical or important service within their organisation, with 82% using video for all or most meetings.

Leading UCaaS vendors are continually investing in video and removing the rigidity that previously existed when communicating on different platforms. Users have the flexibility to launch video calls across multiple platforms. For example, you can launch a Zoom call from a Teams Room or overlay Teams with RingCentral or 8×8. This hybrid approach to meetings reduces barriers to onboarding UCaaS solutions and the drive towards simplicity and adaptability is set to drive innovation forward – at speed.

Adoption & integration

At this point, it’s also worth taking a step back and looking at some of the key advantages of adopting a UCaaS solution in line with other cloud-based solutions.

Firstly, UCaaS can be implemented easily when compared to on-premise alternatives – No servers, switches or complex hardware installations are required.

Upfront costs are kept to a minimum and the entire solution is billed via an ongoing subscription, usually monthly or annual.

The backend infrastructure, ongoing management and support are provided by the vendor and its easy to scale both vertically when adding or removing users or horizontally by adding different tools and applications.

It’s with this last point that there have been significant advancements in recent years. The leading UCaaS vendors are constantly evolving to seamlessly integrate with existing business applications such as CRM’s, databases, AI services and complimentary applications such as call recording or contact center applications (if not already provided by the UCaaS vendor). There are thousands of apps, integrations and extensions already provided by the leading UCaaS players and if you can’t find an integration you are looking for you have the option to work with the vendor to use APIs to integrate your key business systems.

Feature rich

So aside from improving collaboration, enhancing productivity, reducing upfront costs and the immense growth potential in the market are there any other reasons why organisations are turning to UCaaS?

Well, in short yes. UCaaS platforms go further than providing telephony and video. A sophisticated UCaaS platform provides reporting and analytics so your customers can proactively solve issues, spot trends and identify pain points in their systems. Having this level of information will provide the ability to make strategic data driven decisions faster to continually improve customer service, experience and ultimately achieve company goals.

Route to Market

As UCaaS grows in popularity, don’t miss the opportunity to position it to your customers. We can provide you with everything you need to offer UCaaS services to your customers and target markets.

How do we do this?

By leveraging the skills and services offered by our best-in-class UCaaS Vendors directly into your customer conversations and sales engagements.

You don’t need to be an expert in UCaaS to start scoping, selling or deploying and you don’t need to up-skill your technical support as you can utilise the vendors’ capabilities as much as required throughout the entire Sales process. The beauty of this model is that with little investment of time, resources or money you can open the door to new opportunities and additional revenue.

If you would like to learn more about how we can help you invest in this rapidly growing market, please feel free to contact your Account Manager at intY. We would be happy to help.

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