For the past few weeks in the Telecom Tuesday posts we have talked about the Cloud and many of its services. If you read our blog or are familiar with the company, you know that we are the telecom experts. That’s why I love today’s post. It bridges the gap between cloud integrated IT and telecommunications.
Unified Communications
UC integrates real time services such as phone calls, data sharing, instant messaging (IM) and web conferencing and non-real-time services such as email, texting (SMS), voice mail and fax. Clearly, UC is not a single product, but rather a technological architecture allowing access to a multitude of services from multiple media types (Landline, Cellular, Computer, Tablet, etc.). UC is the telecom portion of how Cloud integrates IT and Telecom services.
UC Features
A very useful feature of UC is that a message can be sent on one medium and received on another (i.e., think of a voicemail delivered as email or an SMS message received as voicemail). Another useful service UC offers is known as “presence”. Presence allows other users within the company to “see” how they can reach one another at any given time. For example, a worker may not be at their desk but they may be online from home, from a Hotel, or in another office and reachable via IM, or on a computer to cell phone call. This allows for “follow-me-calling” or conversely, that someone is in the office but not available for calls at all.
Several other benefits of UC include reduced costs, improved customer service, improved flexibility for remote workers, increased worker productivity, increased efficiency and ideally increased revenue. There are also an unlimited number of additional, although slightly less obvious benefits (i.e., simply solution for IT to oversee, outsourcing of many traditional IT responsibilities, improved ease of collaboration with employees, vendors, clients etc.). Most analysts also predict that we have yet to even begin to envision all that will be able to be done through UC/Cloud, but there is already a very compelling story of moving toward the solution.
Today’s business climate demands the ability to instantly pool together resources for data or project collaboration, for technical issue discussion, for pre or post production strategy sessions, for customer service resolution, for sales meeting preparation or presentations, etc. Equipping today’s mobile and digital workforce with tools such as UC enables businesses to develop the internal wherewithal to visualize, design, create, resolve, be first-to-market and gain an upper hand on their competitors.
[author_bio username=”Barry” name=”yes”]
