If Einstein was alive today, his theories about space and time would have been of great interest to the world’s business leaders.
When you think about it, space and time are major inconveniences to business. They get in the way of getting things done efficiently. All of that having to wait around to hear back from someone while they finish what they are doing. Having to actually spend time travelling to attend meetings.
In the quest to eliminate the dragging effect space and time have on business, the mind of an Einstein would have been very useful.
As it is, much of the responsibility for freeing business from the constraints of space and time has fallen on the telecoms industry. And, thanks to the efforts of companies like Fuze, the results are looking positive.
Founded in 2006 in the USA, Fuze has become a major force in the global UCaaS market. It views its mission in simple terms – to leverage the power of virtualised Cloud environments to help people in business ‘get things done’, regardless of where they are and who they need to speak to. Its focus is squarely on supporting flexible, remote working and helping multi-site enterprises connect better.
Named as a leader in Gartner’s 2016 UCaaS Magic Quadrant report, Fuze also takes its role spreading the Cloud message and re-shaping the way people work seriously. For more insight into the company’s philosophy on future work trends and virtual spaces, download its latest report, Breaking Barriers 2020.
In terms of products, Fuze confidently declares its suite of hosted UC tools
“the most modern, innovative UCaaS platform”
on the market, claiming its integrated, unified UX has dispelled the days when UC meant fumbling around between half a dozen different apps.
Before we get into testing out those claims, please remember, Comms Trader does not endorse, market or have any role in the sale of any product. Our reviews are entirely independent and aimed at helping our readers make informed choices with their UC product purchases.
What Can It Do?
Fuze’s Global Platform is a comprehensive suite of cloud-based applications combining voice, video, messaging and contact centre functions within a unified desktop and mobile platform. Available as a hosted subscription service, Fuze offers the typical cloud benefits of being highly flexible, scalable and cost effective, allowing customers to access only the communications platforms they really need.
Although Fuze offers a very broad range of communication and collaboration tools, it makes a point of keeping voice to the fore. Recognising even in these multi-modal times the fact that the core of most business communication remains the telephone, it markets its voice platform as an enterprise-class PBX alternative. It even has a distinct brand for it, Global Voice, which goes slightly against the grain of its all-in-one integrated approach. Regardless of names, it is all the same platform, and connects just as freely with everything else.
As a PBX alternative, Fuze Global Voice offers all of the business telephony and call management features you would expect from an on-premises phone system. Its main benefits over more traditional phone technologies are scale and cost.
As a cloud-based VoIP solution, Fuze Voice requires no additional networking hardware and will plug into most SIP-ready endpoints via LAN/WAN. It provides HD audio on all devices, and as a turnkey solution with no involvement from telcos or carriers, offers unlimited global calling at a single subscription rate. Indeed, Fuze claims to cover the largest number of countries in a single unmetered bundle of any provider. It even refers to its fully virtualised environment as its ‘global network’, with automated capacity management also offering unlimited scalability.
Once we step outside the realm of traditional telephone networks and established carriers, security and QoS are often cited as concerns. Fuze has gone to great pains to eliminate any such worries. All of its services, voice included, operate from a global network of fully redundant data centres. With advanced geographical load-balancing, it offers 99.999% uptime on all of its services – comparable to any other telephony service. All network facilities are fully managed, eliminating maintenance costs, with local customer-facing support teams worldwide.
Voice, of course, is just part of the story. The VoIP functions come with out-of-the-box integration with a full suite of other communication and collaboration tools, including HD one-to-one and group video, web conferencing, IM, email, SMS, presence and desktop sharing tools. HD screen and application sharing is supported by mark-up tools and versioning, so colleagues can work together on documents in real time even if they are on opposite sides of the globe.
As well as supporting internal communications, Fuze apps are also great in the contact centre, with seamless real-time switching between apps from a single control dashboard. So if you need to send a document or an offer to a client mid-call, you can send an SMS or email with a single click, or if you need help from a client, you can send an IM without breaking the flow of your conversation.
For contact centre users, there is also a suite of analytics and business intelligence tools to help monitor performance and service.
What do we like?
Despite offering a ‘global carrier network’, Fuze doesn’t lose sight of the fact that local still means a lot to businesses. So, for example, it offers local dialling tones for the region your customers will be calling from, even if your service is being routed through a data centre overseas. This helps to maintain a geographical identity which can be important to customers, even while the business benefits from the global network.
Fuze also offers a consultancy service to help customers design and implement the best communications service for their needs. This is not just about choosing the right Fuze tools, but also about integrating with existing systems.
Who is it for?
Fuze is designed to offer enterprise-class functionality with all the benefits of a UCaaS service model. It is perfect for large-scale organisations operating multiple sites globally, delivering a single, integrated carrier network for all communications functions with easy deployment, high agility and open-ended scalability.
What is it compatible with?
Fuze apps come ready made to plug into a large range of popular business and productivity platforms, including Salesforce, Google G Suite, Microsoft Outlook, Box, ZenDesk and more. Its APIs also allow customers do things like customize call flows, configure notifications and determine how data sets are used.
Fuze Review – UC Today Opinion
Claiming to offer ‘the most modern, innovative UCaaS platform’ on the market is pretty bold, and there are certainly a few providers who would contest that. However, Fuze has plenty of grounds to be confident about what it does. If the Cloud has done one thing for the evolution of telecommunications, it is demonstrate how barriers of physical systems, of capacity, cost, interoperability and, yes, of time and space can be overcome, replaced by the freedom and flexibility of virtual working environments.
Fuze harnesses all of that in a product offering tailor-made for the enterprise market. The provision of a single global network for all modes of communication fits in with enterprise-scale thinking, while the ready integration of all features answers demands for communication and collaboration to be more intuitive, responsive, and efficient. Designed both for internal comms and contact centre, Fuze offers a solution that is comprehensive, forward thinking and thoroughly modern.
If you are a Fuze customer, we want to hear from you! Do you agree or disagree with this review? What have your experiences been? If you have something to share, please feel free to add to the conversation by posting a comment below. And help us stoke the debate by sharing this article on social media.
