Why UCaaS for SMBs - Cost Savings and Beyond

Businesses of all sizes are making the move to the cloud for their business communication needs, but small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are the primary beneficiaries of cloud technologies for many reasons. SMBs have the most to gain from moving to cloud communications solutions such as UC as a Service (UCaaS), and for many of these businesses, the cloud should be a “no brainer.”

Until recently, SMBs had one choice for their business communications – purchasing premises-based PBX equipment that they need to manage, support, and maintain. With cloud or hosted service offerings such as UCaaS, SMBs now have more choices than ever. While the cloud is appropriate for companies of all sizes, SMBs in particular are turning to cloud services as an easier, more effective way to meet their business communication needs.

Unique Challenges

SMBs have unique challenges, as they compete against larger enterprises with more resources, including staffing and funding. With fewer staff, employees in SMBs “wear more hats” and have more responsibilities, requiring tools to increase their efficiency and productivity. With more limited IT resources, SMBs need solutions that are easy to deploy and manage, while providing the basic functionality needed, at an affordable price point.

Competing with larger organizations with more financial resources is a special challenge for SMBs. Most unified communications and collaboration products were designed with large enterprises in mind, providing the features and functionality enterprises required, at a price point appropriate for these large businesses. This made it increasingly difficult for smaller companies to have the same communications and collaboration capabilities, putting them at a disadvantage. While packaged UCC premises-based products aimed at SMBs have been introduced in the past few years, it was still price prohibitive for SMBs to have enhanced capabilities including conferencing, video, contact center, and more.

This all changed with the cloud.

Enhancing Business Improvements With UCaaS

With reduced complexity, lower operational overhead, and minimized IT requirements, cloud services are generally much simpler for organizations to deploy and manage, while offering the functionality that SMBs require. In addition, with the subscription-based pricing model, businesses pay for what they use, with the flexibility to scale up or down as needed. Updates are automatic, and as new capabilities are introduced by the UCaaS provider, businesses can introduce them to users immediately, without having to make any changes to their hardware or software. Technology obsolescence is a thing of the past, as businesses get upgrades and refreshes as they’re introduced by the cloud provider. Additionally, the cost of ensuring business continuity and redundancy is eliminated, as the cloud provider generally has multiple data centers to minimize any downtime.

SMBs have recognized the impact that enhanced communications and collaboration capabilities has on worker productivity and faster decision making, and have turned to UCaaS as a key enabler for business improvements. SMBs that have deployed UCaaS have benefited from the mobile capabilities that UCaaS provides, enabling workers to connect and be productive from any location or device. In addition, with capabilities such as IM, desktop sharing, document sharing, web and video conferencing, SMB workers can easily share information to help them better do their jobs, solve customer issues, reduce time to market, and improve their business’ bottom line. UCaaS provides SMBs with the same collaborative tools that large enterprises have been using, leveling the playing field and making these firms more competitive.

Helping Business Customers Move to the Cloud - What Service Providers Need to Know

By offering UCaaS to SMB customers, service providers can seize the growing cloud opportunity in order to grow their revenues, reduce churn, and have a path to the future. Selling UCaaS can help service providers fend off competition, increase revenue and ARPU, and provide the “stickiness” that all service providers strive for.

I recently wrote a white paper and participated in a webinar with Miguel Lopes, VP Product Line Management Applications at Dialogic, focusing on how service providers can help their SMB customers move to the cloud. We discussed:

• What entrepreneurs and SMBs really need when it comes to UCaaS
• The Changing UCaaS landscape
• What’s in it for Service Providers?
• The costs of managing UCaaS SMBs subscribers
• How analytics can help service providers increase AMPU (Average Margin per User)

To listen to a replay of this webinar and access the white paper, please click here.

The cloud is not about the future – it’s happening now. Are you ready?