When you bring together the various ways in which people can communicate, including text messaging, voice, video, screen sharing, whiteboarding, conferencing and more, you make it far easier and far more flexible for people to communicate in the most effective way possible. This is why so many companies, large and small, are moving from traditional phone systems to Unified Communication systems.
Accustomed as they are to having an external provider operate their phone system for them, cloud-based unified communications provided as a service (UCaaS) makes the transition far easier, more flexible, and less expensive. UCaaS offers extensive savings and benefits to businesses of all sizes.
It may seem counterintuitive but there really are tremendous savings to be enjoyed by implementing unified communications. Many executives have lost interest in hearing about “soft” cost savings such as “increased productivity” or “higher efficiency.” They can’t readily quantify these, and they need to be able to show “hard dollars-and-cents savings” to their stakeholders. When you unify various communication services onto one singular infrastructure, you eliminate a great deal of duplication.
The same network that transports, stores, and protects your data will also transport your voice, video, and other data types. Not only do you eliminate all the telephone cable and coaxial video cable, you also eliminate the need for the equipment those cables connect to.
You can approximate that every server, every storage device, switches, routers, and every other piece of equipment used to build each of your current networks cost approximately $1,000 per year to power. Even if you conservatively estimate half of that, imagine reducing your company’s electric bill by two-thirds or more. That’s a significant cost reduction that just continues.
Computer equipment that is powered must also be kept cool at a cost from $500 to $1,000 per year to maintain proper air conditioning in your data center.
You won’t need to maintain equipment you no longer have.
Consult your bills for phone services to calculate how much you spent last year on calls between multiple locations. With the entire company on UCaaS, all those internal calls are conducted over your data network or the Internet.
Whether you have dozens of field personnel, hundreds, or even thousands they are all becoming more and more dependent upon their smartphones and tablets to keep in touch. In the past they have called each other by dialing on the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and you’ve paid for each and every call. With UCaaS they will call, share instant messages, see each other on video and share applications and content all across your data network and the Internet with no additional costs.
In a global economy people are often called upon to attend meetings and conferences or make sales or customer service calls in far-flung parts of the world. Travel costs mount up quickly. Video or teleconferencing with UCaaS incurs no additional charges, and non-UCaaS users are included through a convenient web interface. Also, evaluate the time saved by not traveling. Time IS money.
UCaaS enables people from all over the world to leverage the global Internet to conduct videoconferencing, share applications and collaborate, or simply reach out to each other without heavy tariffs or expensive specialized services.
In many companies, creating a document can take weeks. First, someone writes a draft. That draft is then passed from one person to the next. With UCaaS everyone on the team is looking at the same document at the same time, making their edits and comments simultaneously and discussing their changes with each other, developing the final product all together all at once as a team. When users scattered across the country or around the world can all work together simultaneously on the same project all the delays are removed. The company becomes nimble, more agile, taking faster action to win more often.
UCaaS creates a private network but also allows you to connect or “federate” with other companies that use UCaaS. Add the cost of calling any and all of them last year to next year’s UCaaS savings. Perhaps most impressive is that all this enhanced ability to communicate and collaborate is available to the smallest companies or the largest without need for heavy initial investments. Users are subscribed to the service for dollars per user per month.
Given that these savings and benefits are available to companies and organizations of any size they serve to level the playing field for smaller companies in many ways. Beyond all the direct benefits described above, there is the extensive data collection inherent in cloud-based systems including UCaaS. Peter Drucker’s famous warning that what isn’t measured can’t be managed is keenly observed in UCaaS. Records of every transaction and every activity are available for review and analysis at any time.
Calero helps you take best advantage of this tremendous availability of relevant data. Speak to a Calero representative today about each of these UCaaS benefits and more that may be available to your business.