Technology has been changing the world since the invention of the wheel. It can help us to live better, play better and even work better. Business technology continues to evolve. One of the most important parts of any business is communication. No matter what you do, you need to be able to contact vendors, your staff and of course your customers. The telephone, teletype and fax machines were all revolutionary. The development of the cloud has further pushed the envelope. There is a new wrinkle in business communications: UCaas. What is UCaas? Read on to find out more.
Unified Communications as a Service
One of the latest trends in business technology is Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). This service arrived on the scene in 2014 and has continually been adopted by more and more businesses since. UCaaS allows the sharing of data and communications by your entire staff through the use of any device.
How UCaaS Works
Utilizing a single cloud provider, UCaaS provides users with multiple methods of communication. These include telephone, email, video conferencing and enterprise messaging. The cloud can also be connected to a call service center, allowing everyone using the system to access communications with customers and vendors. This is a marked improvement over the old system of using the telephone for all customer communications. A survey conducted in 2015 found that 80% of business employees use text messages in their work. With UCaaS, any preferred form of communication is at your fingertips.
The Two Types of UCaaS
There are two types of UCaaS, single-tenancy and multi-tenancy. Single-tenancy utilizes a software platform that is customized to connect to the applications on-premises. The more costly of the two options, single-tenancy offers greater security. Each customer’s data is separate from the others and downtime experienced by one customer does not affect any of the others. One con of this system is that customers must pay out of pocket for software upgrades.
In a multi-tenancy UCaaS system, the software is hosted at the data center of the provider rather than locally. It has a higher level of reliability than single-tenancy, costs less and can offer software upgrades and other support more easily. The downside to a multi-tenancy system is that it has fewer options for customization.
Technology is unstoppable, continuing to streamline the way you do business. One of the latest trends is UCaaS. It is quickly becoming the preferred method of communication with companies worldwide. It’s definitely worth looking into.
