In the Internet era where this concept is prevalent, the cloud is a major concern. With the influence of the cloud concept, the cloud also appeared in the Unified Communication Service. How is the Unified Communication Service associated with the cloud? What is the difference between the Unified Communication Service under the cloud concept?
"Because all resources are used to manage the Unified Communication platform, it is not a bad choice to choose hosting," said Vanessa Alvarez, an authoritative advisory analyst. "This option is safe at the beginning ."
Alvarez said that although some vendors (such as Cisco) have security cases, before companies can fully trust that key data is securely stored by third parties in different regions, there is still a long way to go in this industry.
Despite this concern and the economic situation delays many projects, the research and development of Unified Communication Service hosting is still a field that vendors are keen to invest in.
For example, at this year's VoiceCon conference, Siemens presented an OpenScape Unified Communication Platform that validates its development concept and migrates it to Amazon's S3 cloud service. The functions of Siemens unified communication can be provided as needed and customized as needed, and can be expanded and configured immediately.
Although Siemens only demonstrated their concept, this trend is clear: Companies in need want to get all the Unified Communication functions that are not difficult to manage.
In the same week as Siemens, IBM expanded the lotus live camp and launched the lotus live Engage (a conference communication suite that integrates chat, charts, and social networks) in SaaS mode ). At the same time, 8x8 has also upgraded its speech and video Unified Communication Products hosted in the enterprise market.
Alvarez says the diversity of choices means companies of all sizes-from small business organizations to large businesses-are aware that if these tools are strategically deployed, it will save a lot of resources.
Small and medium enterprises can hand over most of their communication needs to appropriate custodians, she said. With this method, enterprises can avoid the communication software and hardware costs related to the internal operation of enterprises. In addition, the subscription-based cloud-based Unified Communication Service provides greater flexibility. The company increases or reduces applications as needed, rather than being limited to an unattended application license.
"For small and medium-sized enterprises, they only use the resources they need," Alvarez said. "But ultimately they have to pay for useless features and features ."
The complexity of Unified Communication allows many medium-sized enterprises to work overtime to find products and technologies that are easier to deploy and maintain for them. According to Paul McMillan, Siemens director of Unified Communication Technology and strategy, as more and more functions are added to unified communication, management becomes more and more complex. "People have realized the value of Unified Communication, but you don't want to run it on your own ".
Enterprises are reluctant to send communications to the cloud. Alvarez said, but they also benefit from cloud-based Unified Communication. For example, a company as a whole may not need to use hosting tools, but it may be used by a specific business department.
Despite the appearance of cloud-based Unified Communication at this year's VoiceCon conference, after all, the cloud is still a new face, but hosting a Unified Communication Service may lead enterprises to an unprecedented beautiful environment.
"There are no more products yet, so we are discussing the theory," Alvarez said. However, market leaders such as Siemens, Cisco, and Avaya can quickly change this situation. "If you really believe this is a software-oriented market, one of the attractiveness you believe is that software changes are much faster than hardware ."
A hosted company will always have the latest and best technology, so you don't have to worry about upgrade or compatibility. Kerravala predicts that the main area of innovation is to integrate these SaaS applications into the rest of the enterprise's business scope.
McMillan, who began hosting Siemens cloud computing two years ago, said that the exciting innovation potential comes from external drives, so efforts in this area are worthwhile. "For us, the return for innovation is much higher than any other form of product launch," he said.
"If you plan to provide cloud-based services, services must be at least able to work together," Kerravala said. "For enterprises, this means that they can use the components of the Unified Communication Service and make trade-offs between them at application time, so that they can play a role in their work ."