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.”
Flexible Contact
According to Wood, this demand for flexibility is also reshaping how companies interact with customers, and how they organise their contact centres. But again, this is only further driving demand for the integrated solutions UCaaS offers. Customer service requirements demand that the ability to switch between different modes of conversation must be as seamless and efficient as possible.
“In today’s world, a contact centre means more than just rows and rows of agents,” he said. “In fact, we find that most of our customers have contact centre needs even if they don’t have a physical contact centre in the truest sense.”
“Whether you have a distributed support or sales team or a receptionist directing calls at your company headquarters, you still need the same functionality.
“It’s also critical that organisations integrate multi-channel into their current offerings to stay ahead of the game, and this is something that can be more easily facilitated by the cloud, without significant upfront capital, additional IT costs or integration headaches. Of course, a key advantage of cloud contact centre deployment is the ability to adopt new functionality quickly, affordably and, as it becomes available, to stay at the forefront of customer demands.”
Matching Expectations
Asked about the challenges software developers and service providers face in keeping up with demand for cloud-based comms solutions, Kris Wood says a key factor is making sure enterprise technology can keep up with the expectations users have from consumer ICT products and services. If enterprises are to gain the advantages of UCaaS, they have to sell the platforms to their workers to ensure effective adoption.
He said: “Today’s workforce demands technologies that fit with the way they want to work, interact, and collaborate.”
“At the heart of this trend is an expectation set by consumer devices, with office workers seeking the same usability, accessibility, and seamless integration at work that they experience as consumers. They have come to expect their on-the-job experience to match or even surpass what they experience as consumers, increasing pressure on IT leaders to introduce and deploy technologies with consumer-like user experiences.
“According to a recent Fuze survey of 900 IT leaders, 59 percent are treating the adoption of new communications platforms as a top priority. With so many different consumer options available to workers it’s critical to sell the new processes or tools internally to ensure you drive adoption. You can do this by working with vendors to run adoption campaigns and by identifying champions within your business who can tell others about the benefits. The bottom line is mass adoption is key and failure to put in place measures to achieve this could render your UC investment useless.”
Finally, with more regulations looming in the shape of the GDPR which will put more onus on businesses to keep communications private and secure, Wood said it was up to cloud providers to make this easy for customers.
“Cloud security and the GDPR pose challenges for technology companies, but it’s up to vendors like Fuze to work out the complexity for our customers and make it simple for them to do business,”
he said. “It’s important to follow the discussions about data privacy and the regulatory environment closely and for technology organisations to design their infrastructures in such a way that the market will accept it.”
“When it comes to the tech, Fuze offers geographically-load balanced, multi-data centre architecture design that ensures 99.999% uptime and business continuity, designed to support a number of security and data privacy compliance regulations.”
