In this Industry Buzz podcast, the BCStrategies Experts offer thoughts on what to expect in 2019.
Just in time for Mardi Gras preparations, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE) held its analyst conference in New Orleans, where the discussion was all about verticals and ALE's new cloud overlay service called Rainbow.
Businesses of every size are beginning to embrace cloud communications, as they learn how the cloud can help them reduce costs, manage complexity, and improve productivity. According to industry analyst firm IDC, this ongoing increase in adoption is helping to, in turn, drive the adoption of cloud-based unified communications (UC) and UC-as-a-Service (UCaaS), particularly for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs).
Recent discussion around enterprise cybersecurity has focused so heavily on the cloud and the apps contained within that you would think the cloud is the only area worth considering. But it is important to remember that cloud security begins with any touchpoint in the process and therefore can be vulnerable at any of those sections. With so many parties involved such as customers, users, partners along with APIs, special applications, devices and now IoT, the cloud must be able to reach across and get and gather real-time data and react to know and unknown situations.
Those of us in the UC market have keenly watched the growth of cloud solutions for several years, and can clearly state that the UC Cloud is going mainstream. We have seen many SMB customers migrate to the cloud, and now enterprises are taking the plunge. As a consultant, I am seeing our clients considering replacing their legacy telephony systems with cloud-based UC and Contact Center systems. In fact, all of our clients have asked for cloud solutions to be included in their RFPs.
Expertise in UC, Voice Services, Global Networking, Data Security and Change Management positions Arkadin as a global force in deploying Cloud Microsoft UC services for Large Enterprises
Arkadin, an NTT Communications company, and one of the largest and fastest growing providers of Unified Communications and Collaboration services, announced today the acquisition of Applicable Ltd., a leading provider of Cloud Unified Communications and enterprise voice services with offices in Bristol (UK), Brisbane (AUS) and Houston (USA).
As the new Internet is emerging as a destination to clouds, UC is also rapidly migrating into the cloud as UC-as-a-Service (UCaaS), resulting in the delivery model between the user and the service becoming much more complex and difficult to manage. Think about today's typical on-premise enterprise deployment of UC and how much complexity there is just to deploy and manage mobile users using Bring Your Own Devices (BYODs) and laptops across the wireless network.
As technology marches on, what was once new and uncertain slowly becomes the new norm. That, it would seem, is the case with cloud-based Unified Communications (UC), which is increasingly being adopted for new UC deployments.
According to IDC, by 2017 60% of Enterprise UC as a Service deployments will be cloud based.* Enterprises are continuing to expand their UC solutions to the cloud, enabling workers to have more flexibility and broader functionality, while implementing and deploying new capabilities and technologies with less effort.
Mobility has already become an integral part of unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) and its importance is only expected to grow as time goes on. UC&C and the modern phase of mobility brought on the introduction of the iPhone broke into the enterprise marketplace at roughly the same time, but now this combination is poised to move to the next level. Enterprise customers will need to think long and hard about how they can best capitalize on this powerful combination.
Over the last year the Cloud has been a major trend in the IT industry. Cloud is much more than technology, as cloud industry veteran author Timothy Chou details in his book "Cloud: Seven Clear Business Models," cloud is not a technology, but a business model transformation. Through his analysis, he demonstrates that cloud deployment models generally reduce the cost for a specific software solution by up to 90%. This is due to a combination of scale, focus, specialization, standardization and economies based on repetition.