By David Portnowitz, Star2Star Communications
As businesses grow and expand domestically and internationally, they need a sophisticated way to manage their communications and collaboration. Cloud-based unified communications provides big savings in calling costs—important for large-scale enterprises—and provides geographic flexibility while boosting business productivity. What’s not to like?
The global unified communication market is expected to reach $75.81 billion by 2020,according to Grand View Research. Enterprises emerged as the largest application segment for UC in 2013–2014 and are expected to continue dominating the market over the next six years as they continue to deploy the necessary IP infrastructure to support unified communications.
Grand View said that the increase in mobile workforce as well as enterprise mobility is expected to favorably impact the global market over the next six years as growing demand and proliferation of smartphones continues. In fact, increasing adoption of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiatives by large enterprises is a driving force for the industry.
There are vertical-specific applications to consider (i.e., the adoption of an effective UC system in the government sector aids in operational continuity, emergency response, and situational awareness), but Marlin Financing points out that UC’s ability to unite communications platforms around the office can boost productivity and improve customer and partner satisfaction for any large enterprise, especially those that may have multiple locations and distributed departments. Consider just one small example: the office voicemail that goes without being listened to for hours, because no one is in the room to see the blinking red light on the desk phone.
“Maybe the caller reached out after business hours. Maybe the call came in while you were in a meeting,” Marlin said in a recent report. “Doesn’t matter. Whatever opportunity might have come from that phone call might be irretrievable, all because a busy schedule crowded your view of your answering machine.”
VoIP on the other hand can offer a Find Me/Follow Me function or alerts on one’s smartphone or tablet when a message comes in.
According to an annual trends report from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer, people check their smartphones around 150 times every single day. “Therefore, voicemail messages uploaded to an office email account synced to a smartphone have a greater chance of getting noticed,” Marlin said.
From that simple example, it’s easy to see how Web conferencing, messaging, telephony, and other communications avenues working together to optimize operations is a message that makes sense for boosting productivity.
At Star2Star, scalability and flexibility are key differentiators for our UC solution.
For more information on how Star2Star can scale flexibly for large enterprises, click here.