by Chris Arrigali, Chief Technology Officer at Tier4 Advisors
The race to the cloud is on! In more ways than one.
As cloud technologies continue to reach maturation, and widespread adoption, the question for CIO’s and CTO’s changes from “If we are going to move to the cloud?” to “When are are we going to move to the cloud?” In some cases, the question from CEO’s comes along “Why aren’t we already in the cloud?”
It reminds me of the bridge we crossed not too long ago with regards to E-Mail hosting. As critical as E-Mail is to any organization, I recall much trepidation when it came to making the decision of getting out of the E-Mail business, and handing it off to someone else to manage. Now, E-Mail migration to the cloud is more or less a no-brainer. With Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), we are now in the same boat.
Companies with 10+ and even 20+ year old traditional PBX systems are facing the stark reality that it’s time to replace that bulky box in the wiring closet for various cost and technical reasons that everybody is afraid to touch. The overall direction of UCaaS carries a number of benefits to organizations including unifying communication technologies such as phone, fax, text, video conferencing, and web meetings under a single platform. All these benefits can be managed centrally, with seamless scalability, increased redundancy, simple mobile device integration and mobile user support. Application enablement through APIs utility for capabilities such as CRM, Quality Monitoring, and Business Intelligence. Probably the essential benefit affecting the bottom line is the significant cost savings!
Despite the growing trend, caution still needs to be exercised when it comes to catching the wave. Helping organizations evaluate and navigate through the UCaaS waters is one of Tier 4’s core competencies. With many key vendor partnerships in this space, coupled with our team’s deep technical expertise in this area, Tier 4 is ready to help.
Tier4 Blog Edition 20: December 27, 2017