Fuze is not a company content with just supplying hosted UC services. It strives hard to position itself as a leader in the industry, a recognition it achieved last year in Gartner’s UCaaS Magic Quadrant 2016.
Visit the Fuze website, and you will find numerous reports, position papers and other resources, with titles such as ‘UCaaS 101’ and ‘Cost of Cloud PBX’. This is a company which feels it has a duty to spread the UCaaS message.
So it seemed that a good place to start would be to ask Fuze’s EMEA VP, Kris Wood, to clear up exactly what was meant by UCaaS, as opposed to cloud communications.
“There is a fundamental difference between cloud communications and UCaaS,” he said. “Put simply, cloud communications denotes the internet-based delivery of any number of voice or data applications or services, such as collaboration tools, messaging, conferencing or file sharing, hosted by a third party. UCaaS brings all of these apps, tools and services together, unifying the communications experience to enable people to move seamlessly between multiple ways of communicating and collaborating.”
To some this will sound like splitting hairs, but to Fuze it is key to what they do. Wood acknowledges that, to date, freedom and flexibility has been enough to drive cloud adoption, citing figures from the Cloud Industry ForumC (CIF) which state that 84 per cent of companies now use at least one cloud-based communications service.
But he believes the market has moved beyond lots of separate, isolated apps. To really see the benefits of the cloud, and to drive more efficient communication and working practices, businesses are looking for integrated systems which bring all modes of communication together.
Driving Transformation
“Digital transformation has never been trickier, “ he said. “Think about the sheer volume of communications tools that business need to manage, then factor in the rapidly-changing digital formats and the different types of devices being used today. Employees themselves are a moving target – literally – with shifting preferences to fit their highly mobile lives.
“Effective UCaaS promises to deliver seamless, secure, and cost-effective communication across multiple channels, voice, text, video, etc, on different devices, anywhere the user needs it. This in turn will help with widespread organisational transformation."
“Complex and expensive have traditionally summed up the world of enterprise communications. With UCaaS, businesses can achieve a radically simpler, more cost effective way to communicate and collaborate with on-demand scalability and built-in redundancy for business continuity.”
Wood argues that changing demographic patterns in the workplace are only going to accelerate these trends. “Fuze’s research with 5,000 teenagers from the App Generation shows they expect to work from where they want, when they want and using the devices they choose,” he explained. “It also points to a surge in face-to-face communication, which will call for applications that can offer true voice and video communication to ensure dispersed workforces can carry on enjoying personal face-to-face interactions.”
On top of this, he believes the trend towards collaboration demands better integration between communication platforms.
“True collaboration happens when employees can easily and effectively exchange information and ideas, regardless of where they are and the technology they are using,” he said.
“Employees want to be able to focus on the job in hand, not struggle with the tools they are using. But effective collaboration requires flexibility. UCaaS platforms with open APIs and connectors can quickly accommodate innovative collaboration technologies as they emerge, while ensuring seamless integration with other essential enterprise applications, adapting to the way employees want to work.”
Kris Wood, EMEA VP, Fuze[/caption]
