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.”
Business communications are moving beyond wired messaging and voice calls to wireless Internet connections with mobile devices that support visual, audio, and video user interfaces. The rapid consumer adoption of mobile smartphones and tablets is dramatically expanding legacy forms of business communications to multimodal unified communications (UC).
Why hasn't the UCaaS channel caught fire?
During my recent years in Lync Partner engineering and later as the SaaS Channel manager at Microsoft, I had a chance to meet and work with many dozens of talented and interesting partner executives. These are (mostly) men who were approaching UC as a Service (UCaaS) from one of three perspectives:
The UCaaS channel has been full of promise since the launches of Cisco's HCS, Microsoft's Lync, and numerous other vendor and service products in the 2010 timeframe. Although a few partners are scratching a living off of their offers, by virtually all measures the UCaaS channel has underperformed its promise and its expectations. This two-part series will take a look at what the UCaaS channel needs to have to develop a robust ecosystem for growth.
Digium, Inc. has acquired Atlanta, GA-based VocalCloud, a provider of cloud-based VoIP solutions, and has created the subsidiary Digium Cloud Services. The combined products and services will be sold through Digium's channel partners.
The acquisition closed on August 30, 2013. Since the two companies are privately held, the financial details of the transaction are not disclosed.
The promise of UC as a Service (UCaaS) has loomed large for service providers that believe that the traditional PBX is a dinosaur, that a VoIP service is too limited, and that enterprise UC is better delivered off-premise. Among others, Microsoft's Lync and Cisco's HUCS (now HCS) platforms both splashed on the scene with a lot of fanfare and with high expectations.
The cloud-based UC market continues to grow and as it does leaders will begin to emerge, according to leading IT research company, Gartner. Though there is no current indication of which firms may take the lead positions, this may only be due to the fact that the most recent report on cloud-based UC as a service (UCaaS) was put together in 2011. Nevertheless, it is still a little surprising that no companies attained leadership grade.