Tyrone Robinson 5/28/19 Tyrone Robinson 5/28/19

Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)

UCaaS provides an easily scalable platform that integrates the services necessary for companies to stay ahead of the curve. Additionally, it prevents issues that arise from hardware end of life. Since UCaaS is a service, the provider keeps everything running continuously. It consolidates legacy equipment, eliminates the need for hardware updates, and prevents interruptions to the end user's experience. With this service, the provider makes all required updates in the cloud, guaranteeing a consistently reliable service with easy scalability. In addition to its scalability, UCaaS applications simplify the user experience.

The Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) market has been segmented as follows: telephony, unified messaging, conferencing, collaboration platforms and applications, and analytics. There are often different variations on these options, but, by and large, features tend to fall into these categories. The true value of UCaaS lies in interoperability and integration. The basic value proposition is to combine all these features into a fully unified and fully compatible communications solution that displaces a series of point products, thereby simplifying management, strengthening interoperability, and, in most cases, reducing cost and complexity.

The Foundations of UCaaS include PBX, VoIP, & UCaaS

PBX stands for private branch exchange and is an on-premises telecommunication system that allows employees to access desk phones, conferencing, voicemail, call recording, and fax machines. It also allows for call forwarding and internal employee communications.

The complexity of a legacy PBX system presents quite a few challenges:

It’s challenging to scale and typically requires a significant amount of time to set up and maintain.
Additionally, PBX hardware is a costly capital expense or a CapEx, which is paid at once and usually depreciates over time.
Though still in use today, legacy hardware is incredibly difficult to update and can also be undependable because of its multiple points of failure.
PRIs or primary rate interfaces present additional problems because they’re made of copper and costly for small sites where PRI capacity is wasted on just a few users.

Because of these challenges most companies are moving to the cloud in order to ensure they are not stuck with outdated systems.

Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, is a solution that enables inbound and outbound voice calls using an internet connection in place of a standard phone line. The solution uses an Internet protocol PBX to route digital data packets across the Internet.

One major benefit of hosting VoIP, is that employees can access the services of a PBX on any device that is connected to the Internet. This allows employees to use softphone applications. These are software programs that enable voice calls and other PBX-based services to take place over the Internet and be accessed on laptops, smart phones, and other devices. Customers can easily enable features that transcribe voicemails into emails as well as easy dial-in conferencing.
Unlike a traditional PBX, VoIP is scalable and more flexible.

UCaaS is a unified communications solution that is hosted in the cloud. Meaning that various channels of communication are seemingly integrated with one another. The service provider manages all VoIP and PBX services in addition to all other required applications. This usually includes dial tone, voice calls, voicemail, Instant Messenger, and video and audio conferencing.

Many providers can offer these services bundled or à la carte; therefore in short, all UCaaS includes VoIP, but not all VoIP is UCaaS.
Because UCaaS is a recurring service, it is considered an OpEx charge. One of the main benefits of this type of billing is that there are not any surprise expenses.

Connecting UCaaS

UCaaS can help improve visibility into critical business operations, as well as improve company efficiency. The great thing about it is that it can be stood up very quickly. The biggest part is the porting of numbers, which is usually the longest phase of the deployment. But you can forward those numbers to your UCaaS solution earlier, even though all the features might not be immediately available.

UCaaS connections include the following: Over-the-top, using SD-WAN, MPLS, and a dedicated voice circuit.

Over-the-Top: The most common and most cost effective option is an internet connection called over-the-top. For this connection, the customer only needs a basic public internet connection at their headquarters and branches. Providers will do a network test before deploying the service to make sure the circuits can handle the traffic that’ll be passing over them in this option.
SD-WAN: Many customers look for UCaaS and SD-WAN solutions simultaneously because SD-WAN can dramatically improve application performance since it actively chooses the best link between sites. In this setup, two circuits run from each business site to an SD-WAN gateway and connect to the UCaaS providers data center. These circuits can be anything from broadband to fiber to MPLS, but ultimately help optimize traffic. A defining feature of SD-WAN is its dynamic path selection, meaning it can measure the available paths and evaluate how they are performing.

MPLS or Multiprotocol Label Switching: Most customers who connect using this connection already have MPLS, but some providers require customers to use specific types. Network architects can configure this set up in many different ways. However, in this diagram, the primary connection to UCaaS for each location is linked using MPLS. MPLS is a routing method that transfers data and voice between connection points and assigns priorities to certain data in order to shape traffic flows. If a location were to go down, the traffic can be rerouted via an active location preventing a long-term outage. This scenario gets to be a bit more costly and it’s not usually very frequent, but some customers value a private SLA backed connection over a cost effective public IP solution.
Dedicated Voice Circuit (from the supplier): Many times this means that the headquarters has a dedicated circuit while the branch offices connect via public internet. In the examples shown here, if something happens to the internet connection at the customer site, the branch is able to connect by rerouting through the headquarters and using their dedicated voice circuit. Like MPLS, this can get costly, but again having a guaranteed SLA on their network is critical for certain customers.

Benefits and Business Drivers

Common UCaaS business drivers and benefits emphasize its simplicity and scalable qualities. Specifically, some benefits of using UCaaS are its centralized control, OpEx charge, and built-in disaster recovery. One of the first areas where UCaaS savings show themselves is after the care and management of the phone system are offloaded to a third party. That part alone removes some of the burden from internal teams. This, in turn, allows them to focus on other areas of new or strategic importance. Ultimately, these six business drivers emphasize the solutions’ scalability and simplicity: collaboration tools, hardware end-of-life prevention, easier administration, mobility, global accessibility, and line of business application integration.

Benefits by Vertical

UCaaS was originally considered an offering best suited for small businesses, but it is rapidly replacing legacy PBX systems in companies with annual revenues between $10 million and $100 million. Today, UCaaS benefits almost every vertical. Retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and financial services are just a few examples.

Retail: A retail chain could implement UCaaS because its consolidated communications, easy scalability, and enhanced reporting provide better visibility into critical business operations. Not only do reports detail how long employees are on calls, but many solutions have the ability to detail what was exactly said on those calls. UCaaS can also extend additional methods of communication to customers, resulting in streamlined data for improving workflows and ultimately increasing revenue. Specifically, a retail chain can tie in their cash registers with their phone systems, deploy overhead paging systems, and use tablets and wireless phones to efficiently provide product information to shoppers. UCaaS can revolutionize in-store shopping through improved personalization and customer service.

For many industries, communications really defines a company – in this case it includes how you communicate within your business, how you make decisions, where your bottlenecks are located, and how you communicate with your customers. So, not just providing the voice, but providing analytics can really change retail companies because performance can be directly tied to numbers.

Manufacturing: Across manufacturing plants, UCaaS is able to provide connections between international and domestic sites by reducing on-prem legacy hardware. Additionally, UCaaS improves production on the manufacturing floor. Within facilities, UCaaS allows for reliable connections between devices, which benefits production by reducing downtime. Finally, it enables softphone applications to track production progress as it happens, all while integrating collaboration tools and other applications seamlessly.

UCaaS also has profound implications in manufacturing where QR codes could facilitate the availability of a wide range of data on contracts, warranties, maintenance, etc., all easily accessible via smartphone. The global movement toward smart factories with increased technical integration is a case in point. Further advancements in computer-aided design is a similar example, in that UCaaS can be used to enhance communication among the team.

Healthcare and financial services were not among the first verticals to deploy due to concerns regarding security and compliance. UCaaS has become more feasible since there have been significant improvements to privacy in the cloud.

Healthcare: The solution benefits the healthcare industry because it improves the quality, frequency, and type of remote patient interactions, allowing staff to treat patients more efficiently. In 2019 and 2020, the healthcare vertical had some of the highest growth rates in UCaaS adoption. Since many providers were able to quickly deploy UCaaS seats while also ensuring facilities maintained HIPAA compliance, UCaaS became a necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Financial Services: Like healthcare, financial services also require more sophisticated levels of security and compliance. These institutions often benefit from unified communications for both customer engagement and increased collaboration among departments. Often, these institutions also benefit from updating their legacy hardware without sacrificing PCI, SOC, and SOX compliance.

In Conclusion…

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