If making the transition from traditional communications methods to UC was highly advantageous before the pandemic – post-COVID, it’s becoming almost impossible to stick only to one’s legacy infrastructure. Businesses around the globe struggle with various challenges as they migrate their communications operations to the cloud.
Helping companies face those challenges is second nature to leading Singapore-based cloud communications provider Toku.
“While the process of migrating to the cloud has been happening for several years now, it is still seen as losing control for many IT professionals, who have been managing their on–premises systems for decades and have built bespoke functionalities to answer specific needs,” explains Thomas Laboulle, Founder and CEO of Toku.
“It’s important to understand that digital transformation is not a copy-paste of an on–premises system to the cloud. It’s about reinventing business processes and service configurations that are actually leveraging on the advantages of a cloud-based deployment – one of which is the infinite amount of possible integrations.”
APAC-Specific Challenges
While the challenges are universal, APAC companies may find themselves struggling a little harder than companies in Europe and the US – where a more significant portion of the business sector has already migrated to the cloud. In APAC, the process is slower since most companies are a bit more hesitant, which requires that extra bit of region-specific speciality.
A second APAC-specific challenge has to do with number porting.
“In North America and in Europe, porting numbers is relatively simple. In APAC, however, there are telco regulations that make it more complicated, especially for global players who are not familiar with the regional telco market,” says Laboulle.
“This may seem like a detail – but for a company that has been active for years, changing a phone number is a big deal.”
MS Teams: An Easy Path to Migrating to the Cloud
To deal with the unique pace and the specific cloud-migration concerns among APAC companies, Toku offers a hybrid approach. Toku’s hybrid approach allows a gradual transition, enabling companies to both keep their legacy infrastructure and begin the transition to Microsoft Teams at the same time.
“It’s important to understand that you can achieve a UC experience for your business users without having already figured out an answer for all the limitations in advance,” explains Laboulle.
“It’s really reassuring for the IT and finance departments that not every single aspect of their on-premises solution must be cloud-compatible from day one. We allow them to keep everything that is legacy as is for the time being, while focusing on providing their business users with the MS Teams experience.”
“One of our customers is multinational advertising company JCDecaux, which is a great use case example,” shares Laboulle.
“They have regional offices in different countries across Asia Pacific, and every site has its own individual requirements, since they don’t have all the same legacy systems. We help them deploy MS Teams in a site-adapted manner, so that the end users will not be impacted by the legacy infrastructure and get to have their business telephony directly in Teams.”
When it comes to number-porting challenges, Toku gains big advantage from being a regional player.
“Toku’s USP compared to global players it that we own the APAC connectivity layer. We have strong local telco partnerships, which are in fact the foundation of these digital transformation projects. Global players often can’t offer the required level of granularity and localization that we are able to”
It’s only a matter of time until APAC businesses adapt to the cloud environment. There are still challenges ahead, but using the assistance of regional specialists like Toku is a big step in getting there.
