In every industry, there is a point at which the wide swath of solutions serving the market begin to converge.
At first, we see new solutions pop up to address market challenges, widening the selection for customers to choose from — each to their own niche. A smaller group of features like instant messaging will rise to the top of the most used list while call forwarding may be less of a crowd favorite.
But as solutions mature, they come together under platforms, becoming more convenient for consumption by the users.
This is the change that we are seeing now in a breakdown in the barriers across the various “as a services” like Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) as key examples of solutions that are blending together.
“It’s really about the whole customer journey,” says William Rubio, CallTower’s Chief Revenue Officer. “Organizations expect to have all their vital services integrated together. They want their CRM to work seamlessly with their CCaaS, boards to be available everywhere, more functional APIs, and of course it all has to be secure.”
Said another way, these organizations want to make the transition to the cloud and focus less on how they access their services and more on actually doing the work that they are there to do.
“It’s about making it easier for employees to get their work done, and less time spent on messing around with multiple steps in different apps just to get to their call,” Rubio tells UC Today.
No Two Digital Workspace Roadmaps Look Alike
But while many to most organizations have staked out the goal of reaching a robust cloud deployment of services, making this transition to the right constellation of cloud-based solutions will differ significantly both between and within organizations.
Even as mask mandates are being pulled back and more organizations attempt a Return to Office, hybrid work is here to stay. That is to say, hybrid, and not just “Work from Office” or totally remote. And how this arrangement ends up looking will vary widely from every organization to department to team.
For some, the right fit for them may be jumping in whole hog and going full on cloud native for their entire operation with Cisco WebEx or Microsoft Teams for UCaaS. If they need a CCaaS, then go full on with a Five9. This path is relatively straightforward and an easy lift for a provider of UCaaS and CCaaS solutions like CallTower.
Where it gets interesting is for those organizations that need to diversify their position on the hybrid cloud spectrum. Maybe they have already invested heavily in on-prem systems that they are not ready to throw in the trash heap. Or they might want to have some offices stay on-prem while others go to the cloud.
“The solutions that work for the Sales team may not be the right fit for the C-levels or R&D,” says Rubio.
This means that there is no single cookie-cutter roadmap for reaching their cloud communications goals. Marking out the right path and executing on it requires putting in the time and effort to do the discovery with every organization and team — especially if you want to root root-out shadow IT.
“It’s really all about doing the legwork behind the scenes for the customer,” says Rubio. “Customers nowadays really do the research and pick the best of breed, choosing what really works for them across the board in line with their available resources. We come in as that consultant with our indirect channels and really understand the different drivers for each one of the business units, because now marketing, sales, operations, and the executives are all sitting at the table. You didn’t have that before when it was just the IT team.”
“All these different business units or departments within the business units that are saying ‘I need this, I need that. Can you deliver that to me?’, he says, explaining that it might be one solution or platform, or it might be multiple. “It’s all about delivering on the different needs of those different groups.”
Solutions Over Products
As a provider of solutions across vendors, working for nearly 20 years with Microsoft as a Gold Partner and a significant chunk of time with Cisco and others, CallTower is well positioned for this complexity.
They help their clients by working with them to find the right mix of solutions — and not necessarily any one vendor’s single one-size-fits-all product suite.
“Not everybody wants to do a rip and replace,” says Rubio. “We work with our customers to understand their pace towards the cloud, making sure that we get the right fit for them.”
“When you’re driving the right set of solutions to a customer, you hopefully give them a competitive advantage. They communicate better, they keep their costs down, they’re more efficient, and productivity goes up, making for happy employees and happy customers.”
Find out more about CallTower.
