Unified Communications as a Service – UCaaS

14 April 2021
|By Mida
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Categories: General, Telephony

What does Unified Communications as a Service mean?

Unified Communications as a service (UCaaS) is a cloud-based service platform that comprehenders telephony and voice, video and audio conferencing, real-time messaging and presence – and this is basically the same definition of UC – with the crucial difference that UCaaS is hosted by a service provider in the cloud and companies pay in the proportion of the actual number of licenses they need to activate. This model is preferred especially for small businesses because it doesn’t require them to set up on their own infrastructure before get started.

Among the typical characteristics of the UCaaS, there are multitenancy and self-service web portals for provisioning, performance/ usage reports and management. It is a flexible, agile, easy to access, and scalable solution that allows the company to purchase just what it really needs.

Among the main advantages of UCaaS:

  1. Scalability. It allows companies to shift from a capital investment (CapEx) to an Operating cost (OpEx) model, giving them the opportunity to increase or decrease their consumption very rapidly, with no need for capital. Over-capacity is non-existent in this model.
  2. The service provider takes care of all the maintenance, technical updates, safety aspects. From the technical perspective being able to update a Uc system with new features and upgrades is non-trivial and the high level of expertise required is difficult or very expensive for companies to maintain. With the UCaaS companies can off-load the technical complexity to the Provider, ensuring at the same time that the latest technology is available.
  3. Built-in redundancy
  4. Empowered user experience: most of UCaaS solutions can be integrated with some of the existing tools/applications company use for quality control or sales processes (i.e. CRM and other business-critical softwares)
  5. The cloud nature of the solutions make them ideal in the new work from anywhere scenario
  6. Extra levels of Security (many UCaaS platforms are compliant with regulations like HIPAA, PCI, SOX and more)