In this newsletter, we’re wrapping up (for the moment) our discussion of why moving VoIP and UC services into the cloud could be a great choice for you. In particular, our excerpts from the complimentary “2011 Sourcebook for VoIP and UC Services” by Delphi and Webtorials continue, and we encourage you to download the full version (45 pages) to get all of the details.
Why Should You Consider VoIP and UC as a Service?
As noted in the report, “Reducing costs is almost always the primary driver for considering a hosted solution. The first benefit is a controlled and predictable cost. This is typically what drives the enterprise to look at cloud/hosted services. Because the cloud/hosted site is shared with many other subscribers, the overall hardware, software and operations costs can be prorated over the subscribing organizations.
“However there are other advantages that can accrue to the subscriber to cloud/hosted communications services:
• “Flexible sizing – The cloud/hosted solution can expand or reduce the number of seats very quickly. This is especially useful when the number of active seats varies by season or for special events or situations or emergencies.
• “Business continuity/reliability – The cost of high availability (99.999%) may be beyond most budgets. The continued operation when a disaster occurs and the rapid recovery of communications services is financially more affordable with a cloud/hosted solution than if the enterprise tried to produce the same level of business continuity on the enterprise site(s).
• “Staffing – The enterprise IT staff responsibilities are significantly less with a cloud/hosted solution. The IT staff can be smaller and will not require expensive certification training to support premise based/owned systems. The IT function will primarily deal with service administration.
• “Software – The enterprise does not have to deal with and pay for software subscription fees and licensing costs.
• “Management – The enterprise does not have to allocate significant time to managing the solution. Enterprise management will deal with a contract that can have very specific deliverables and service-level agreements.
• “Features and functions – The enterprise can gain access to features and functions that are not available on their existing system/service or that are too expensive to implement.
We hope that these tidbits have been sufficient to entice you to download the entire report, and they indeed are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg and don’t even address and of the extensive information gathered concerning almost 50 suppliers of these services.
