Hosted UC or Not

Recent initiatives from vendors and service providers to bring enterprise hosted UC solutions to the SMB community are enabling small businesses to be more agile and more competitive – although what they have done is not new to enterprise companies. Siemens, Shell Oil, Intel and many other large corporations do almost exactly what these hosted providers are now doing, but those technologies have been way out of reach of small businesses because of limited budgets or limited technical capabilities.

There are a variety of vendors that offer different types of hosted UC applications allowing companies to reap the benefits of a new integrated and collaborative product. Small businesses can now reduce travel expenses by replacing in-person meetings with immersive Web, video, and audio conferencing.  “At the same time, more than 85 percent of companies are increasing the number of telecommuters,” according to a white paper written by Irwin Lazar of Nemertes Research titled, “Roadmap to UC Products that Reap Rewards.” By freeing employees from fixed desks or offices, and increasing occupancy density in buildings, organizations can lower real estate and facility costs.

In an article for Network World, Lazar writes, “By 2010, we predict UC managed and hosted services will be gathering even more momentum, and by 2013 we predict that end-to-end management and hosted/SaaS communication offerings will be deployed by a majority of all size organizations.”

Preliminary market research shows massive interest in the full Hosted Unified Communication Services. Existing pricing models, technical expertise and limited resources to deploy or manage a new solution are the primary obstacles to overcome for widespread acceptance of “True UC.”  Several benefits of Hosted UC include:

• Hosted or cloud-based solutions average a 75 percent reduction in startup expenses, management time by 90 percent and TCO by 25-30 percent compared to an on-premise PBX system. This brings the costs of new systems from $2,000/user down to $250-$350/user.
• Business Continuity: Direct access to redirect calls or relocate your entire business in the event of a storm or disaster
• Mitigate Technology Obsolescence – New features and functionality made available without costly upgrades, elimination of maintenance fees and costly moves, adds and changes.
• Scalability: Easily add and remove users as your business expands and contracts to fit you business needs.
• Consolidation: One vendor to manage and one bill to pay for Local, Long Distance, Exchange, OCS, SharePoint & Internet.
• Improve Employee Efficiency and Customer Satisfaction: salespeople, remote workers and mobile executives can do business from any location and never miss a call or message. Features such as messaging and collaboration, answering your office phone from your cell phone, have voice mails show up as an e-mails, find me follow me, call accounting, etc. drastically improve productivity.

William R. Bumbernick is president and CEO of Alteva LLC. He has more than 10 years of senior management and entrepreneurial experience in telecom, IT and managed services. Since 1994, William has been involved in executive levels of leadership within the technology and telecommunications sectors.