MARKET REPORT Unified Communications
“The UC&C market isn’t coming from the traditional vendors, it’s been developed from social applications, such
as WhatsApp, it’s fully federated and free of charge.” Paul Taylor, Sales Director - Voiceflex
designed platform, with intuitive
interfaces, and a simple upgrade
path, it is possible to deliver a
solution that is genuinely simple
to use and support at all levels
from SME all the way up to
Enterprise.”
Paul Taylor of Voiceex says
the deployment of applications
has been changing for many
years.
“e UC&C market isn’t
coming from the traditional
vendors, it’s been developed
from social applications, such as
WhatsApp, it’s fully federated
and free of charge. ere are
300 million active users, with
3 million companies using
WhatsApp business and there
are 2.5 billion monthly active
users which can be federated.
Let’s remind ourselves
Facebook was formed only
in 2004, 16 years ago and
Workplace by Facebook
now has an extensive list of
worldwide clients. Microsoft
Teams is fully UC&C which
is included within Oce
360. With MS products, the
user experience is the same
regardless of the size of the
instant.
Just using these three
companies as a reference point,
most of us will be in a number
of WhatsApp groups, which
could be a company using
the app for verbal, visual and
written communications. Add in
document sharing to provide a
full UC application and the cost
is free of charge. erefore, with
UC&C you set up one user and
federate. e number of clients
or end-users is to a large extent
immaterial.
e same applies with any
paid version of UC&C; you
pay per user and the size of the
opportunity is immaterial and
the user experience will be the
same whether you are a 5 or
5,000 user site.
Vendor support? at’s old
school and with every telephony
application having, or in the
process of adding, connectivity
to MS Teams, how long will it
be before they add in Workplace
by Facebook or WhatsApp
Business?
e telecommunications
market has always been fast
paced and the uptake of UC&C
within the social and business
area is the fasted uptake I have
ever seen, and resellers should
be looking at how they adapt to
the changing market.”
ED SAYS…
It is clear from the companies that we spoke
to that the prospect of having applications
that are cost effective working across a
range from a handful to several thousand
is a reality. This is both an opportunity
and a threat for many vendors who have
traditionally set up ‘walls’ between their SME
and Enterprise class products.
© metamorworks-stock.adobe.com
which are designed to work
together from the ground up.
“All too often service providers
pick and choose components
from dierent suppliers with
varying success. is sometimes
results in a disjointed end user
experience, with wildly dierent
user interfaces to learn and
support. By choosing a vendor
with a suite of products designed
to work together from the start
will translate into superior
reseller support.
e other consideration, is
how well the platform can scale
in terms of features and size. Can
it support a growing business
and is the upgrade path easy and
trouble free?”
Grant adds that his solution
is powered by Metaswitch and
has over 30 million seats live
worldwide – tried and tested
technology.
“We oer complete
exibility; our platform can be
a standalone product working
with an on-premise PBX, a
standalone single line in the
Cloud and scales all the way up
to a multi-thousand seat call
centre solution. erefore, it
can work outstandingly well
for any business at any stage of
their Telecoms/Cloud journey.”
Grant adds that historically,
one might logically expect that
the more feature-rich the seat
license is, the greater the impact
on support departments.
“However, with a properly
CHANGING TRENDS
The Mitel survey report also reveals that with today’s increasingly
distributed and mobile workforce, the appetite for more modern
communications and collaboration technologies is clearly on the rise.
• Respondents expect to use online shared workspaces (45%),
chat/messaging (51%) and video (39%) tools more frequently in
the future.
• Given the significant waste surrounding resource costs and time,
it’s no surprise that 74% of respondents felt that more effective
use of technology within their organisation would improve their
personal productivity.
• The real obstacles organisations must overcome aren’t rooted
in the tools themselves; instead, insufficient training (32%) and
resistance to change (25%) are the biggest culprits.
32 | Comms Business Magazine | April 2020 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
/metamorworks-stock.adobe.com
/www.commsbusiness.co.uk