The global unified-communication-as-a-service (UCaaS) market is growing rapidly, valued at $32 billion in 2023 and projected to grow from $36 billion in 2024 to $107 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights. With this explosive market growth, we’re seeing many UCaaS win stories on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). UCaaS customers are migrating their workloads to OCI for compelling reasons that we’ll delve into in a different blog post.
In this blog post, we explore the UCaaS industry, understand their various product offerings, and highlight the benefits to enterprises for adopting UCaaS.
Why effective communication is important in business
Effective communication between employees is paramount for any enterprise to achieve success in the business world, especially in the current flexible and hybrid work environment. It serves as an indispensable component in fostering collaboration, which is integral to driving productivity and achieving organizational goals. For businesses to thrive in today’s environment, effective communication must adeptly cater to the requirements of both the business itself and its employees. When done correctly within the company, it results in a range of benefits, including enhanced efficiency, streamlined operations, and deeper connections among employees. On the flip side of a business, smoother communications translate into a better customer service experience, giving organizations the ability to meet or exceed consumer demands for a competitive advantage. Now that we understand the importance of effective communication, let’s talk about unified communication.
What is unified communication?
Unified communication (UC) solutions are designed to integrate various communication channels and tools, including telephony, video conferencing, instant messaging, email, and more, into a single platform. This integration streamlines communications, enhances collaboration, and facilitates seamless interactions between employees, customers, and other stakeholders. Traditionally unified communication services were hosted within company’s own data center where apart from managing their application stack, service providers would also manage the physical data center building, utilities, cooling system, physical hardware, network connectivity, and security, which made hosting UC applications difficult and often prevented businesses from scaling up faster and expanding globally quickly.
What is unified communication as a service?
While unified communication means hosting solutions on-premises or in the cloud, unified communications as a service (UCaaS) is a specifically cloud-based communications model that delivers a comprehensive suite of enterprise communication services and applications over the internet. So, customers can access the tools they need from virtually anywhere at any time, enabling teams to stay connected from an office, their homes, or while traveling.
A UC system includes the following common components:
- Telephony: Secure and global phone call services, including call forwarding, conference calling, call recordings, and advanced call routing with integration to traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN)
- Voice over IP (VoIP): Audio and video calls
- Integration with PSTN
- Meetings: Providing video team meeting and webinar capabilities for teams, allowing face-to-face interactions even across time zones with advanced collaboration features like screensharing, recordings, and chat.
- Video conferencing
- Audio conferencing
- Content sharing and collaboration
- Whiteboarding
- In-meeting messaging
- Meeting and conference rooms
- Chat and instant messaging: Chat and instant messaging services, including features like individual and group messaging, team and project channels, and embedded file sharing capabilities for quick and convenient communication.
- One on one chat
- Group chat
- Team and org channels
- Broadcast channels
- Platform integration: Collaboration features, such as calendars and scheduling, file sharing, and project management tools, make it easy for employees to work cross-functionally and align on goals.
- Email integration
- Calendar and scheduling
- File sharing
- Process workflows
- Contact center: Contact center features that allow customers to access assistance through chat, messaging, email, and so on.
- Contact center
- Customer relationship management
- Customer support
- Call routing
- AI: AI and machine learning technologies like chatbots and smart assistants, automated workflow, improve accessibility with speech-to-text capabilities, language translation, intelligent meeting summarization, scheduling and recommendations.
- Transcription
- Translation
- Call summarization
- AI companion
- Chatbot
- AI webcams
Top cloud platform requirements for hosting a UCaaS service
Many UCaaS solutions operate on a monthly or annual subscription, with pricing based on tiered services and number of users. You can deploy a UCaaS solution in a cloud environment as a single-tenant or multitenant deployment, depending on end customers’ use cases and requirements. The service is also deployed in multiple regions all over the world to provide low latency and higher throughput connection to users. UCaaS service providers also must ensure that their unified communications platform fully complies with all local, state, and federal regulations, while still serving multinational companies with global user base.
While evaluating the right cloud platform, consider the following requirements that are integral for successfully hosting a UCaaS service:
- Cost-effective and reliable network service: These solutions often rely heavily on network utilization with high data egress. Data traverses across the globe, making latency and network throughout an important parameter for operation. In today’s world where most of business meetings have gone remote with users spread across the entire globe, having a strong, consistent, and reliable network backbone with low data egress pricing is key to the success of UCaaS business.
- Flexible and performant compute instances: UCaaS services are deployed in clusters of compute nodes often scaling up and down to meet the traffic spikes. The availability of compute nodes when needed and flexible shapes allow UCaaS to accurately match the traffic pattern. These options maximize resource utilization, lower resource wastage, and improves cost efficiencies for the business.
- Global presence: Today’s enterprises have employees and customers spread across multiple geographies. To provide better customer experience and serve data sovereignty requirements, UCaaS services are often replicated across multiple regions. Cloud platforms with regions close to the users, providing full breadth of services across all regions, with consistent pricing and easy and flexible contracting terms to operationalize in new regions, allow UCaaS to expand to new territories faster.
Benefits of UCaaS
UCaaS revolutionized the way businesses communicate by bringing together different technologies and services into one convenient platform. Whether a small business is looking to reduce operating costs, or a large enterprise wants to improve customer service, UCaaS can provide a comprehensive solution to meet the communication needs with the following features:
- Ease of Use: UCaaS relies on software, end user devices, and a connection to the cloud service provider. The software is typically intuitive and easy for most people to use, wherever they’re located.
- Cost savings: One of the most significant advantages of UCaaS is its cost savings. UCaaS allows businesses to cut back on the cost of buying and maintaining on-premises hardware and software, as well as staffing and training costs. Because UCaaS is cloud-based, companies spend less on maintenance, licensing fees, and initial installation. Businesses can also save on office and travel expenses.
- Scalability: UCaaS solutions simplify onboarding and make it easy to add new users as teams grow. UCaaS systems also have the newest technology to improve businesses processes, automatically updating with new security features, tools, and apps.
- Increased productivity: Instead of working across several platforms, employees have everything they need in a centralized location, eliminating the need for employees to waste time switching between communication platforms. This streamlining can help employees stay organized and on-task. UCaaS also allows employees to participate in video conferencing and use other collaboration tools that can help them work together more efficiently, which is especially valuable in today’s hybrid work environments. The ability to easily share documents and files and the capability to work in real time on shared projects further increases cross-organization productivity.
- Improved customer service: UCaaS can also help businesses provide improved customer service. By utilizing a unified communications platform, businesses can offer customers multiple communication channels, which makes it easier and more convenient for customers to get in touch. Businesses can also use UCaaS to send automated customer service messages, such as appointment reminders, order confirmations, and other notifications, directly to customers. This capability can help businesses provide a more personalized and efficient customer service experience. Finally, businesses can utilize UCaaS to set up call queues, which can help ensure that customer service calls are routed to the right person or department quickly and efficiently.
- Streamlined vendor relations: Instead of working with a different vendor for voice, messaging, video, fax and more, with UCaaS, it’s all in one place. UCaaS simplifies communications: One vendor for everything, with one contract to negotiate providing more power to negotiate volume-based discounts for each service when they fall under the same trusted provider.
Conclusion
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, almost all companies have adopted UCaaS technology which enabled teams to work remotely from home. This trend is here to stay as more companies adopt a permanent hybrid or flexible working model. UCaaS had an upper hand in servicing this market need, with faster time to market with new features and lower operating cost compared to traditional deployments. UCaaS service providers must continue to evolve, make their applications more feature-rich, encourage participation in discussions, and better engage audience in meetings. With increased UCaaS adoption and integration of AI services, demand for critical resources to host the UCaaS application continues to grow rapidly too. At the same time, UCaaS providers must ensure that their applications and user data are safe and secure.
OCI has proved to be an excellent partner for hosting the UCaaS services, trusted by many leaders in the industry. In the next related blog post, we investigate some of the compelling reasons why.
To learn more about hosting your UCaaS application on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, refer to Migrate ISV Applications to the Cloud or contact us.