Over the last several years we have seen the communications industry go through an enormous and rapid transformation in area after area. Small- and mid-size business customers see unified communications as one of these sweeping trends. Eventually, as UC continues to grow, every company will jump in or they will lose market share. However, early adopters of this technology can gain a competitive advantage.
Unified communications is the term that encompasses a world where business customers don’t have to buy expensive computers and switching stations. Rather, they contract with UC providers to manage and maintain the equipment, while they communicate better with their workers, suppliers and customers. UC uses wireline, wireless, the cloud, IoT and more to help users create a state of the art communications network for their business.
UCaaS leaders include AT&T, Verizon, Frontier Communications, Mitel and more
UCaaS competitors are a growing list of companies, large and small. These are leaders like AT&T, Verizon, Frontier Communications, Mitel, CenturyLink, Windstream, Cisco, Digium, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, BT, Huawei, NEC, Unify, HP, IBM, Logitech, Microsoft, SoftCo and more. This space will continue to be a rapidly growing and very powerful sector going forward. Something that every business will use.
However, this new industry segment does not have a well-known leader yet like AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile and Sprint in wireless. This is a great opportunity for the early providers of this service to strike while the iron is hot and capture the imagination of the marketplace. That means even smaller competitors can lead going forward if they can catch the wave.
Unified communications still young and rapid growth expected to continue
UC is still a young marketplace and its growth is expected to continue to be explosive. It is full of both larger and smaller companies and that means we can expect to see plenty of both growth and consolidation like we saw in wireless over the last decade or two.
Small- and mid-size companies can gain a competitive advantage over even larger competitors if they make the right moves today implementing a UC strategy. They can provide a new level of communications and service to their customers. In fact, it’s usually the small and mid-size business segment that drives many of these changes. It’s much easier and quicker for a small business to implement and use new technology than their larger counterparts.
UC let’s providers of telecom services use the cloud to offer innovative services to improve business continuity and data recovery in case of natural disasters, ransomware or other threats. In today’s world companies need to use these services to both communicate and to protect and save their data.
Frontier Business Total360 data recovery tool protects data files
Example, Frontier Communications launched their Total360 which converts data directly from your servers into virtual machine-readable files that can be recovered from a web-based interface, hypervisor or virtual machine monitor.
They say this way of storing data allows for instant on-site or off-site recovery and helps minimize organizational downtime in the event of a digital or physical disruption or disaster.
As we move further into virtual communications with UC and the cloud, we must embrace all the new ways to communicate with customers, workers and suppliers. We also must use this new technology to protect and safeguard our data.
We are still in the very early days of this unified communications revolution. Step-by-step, year after year it will continue to transform every company, large and small, and the way we actually do business. This is a huge new and growing opportunity for both the end user companies and for the entire UC industry.
