Why simply moving your UC to the cloud won’t save you

In the modern age, technology is rife with promises.

In fact, it seems that technology in general drives direction for some organizations—but rarely results in the desired outcome.

And this is especially the case in the world of Unified Communications.

Case in point: it wasn’t so long ago that many chose a new form of UC—an on-prem “solution” that promised to do away with the frustrations associated with big telecom providers. Sold on dreams of more flexibility and being free of “big corporate telecom” control, IT departments ran towards those solutions in droves. This move continued to be fuelled by a “we’ll-show-them” mindset, paired with the thought that telecom unto itself would be easy with this new do-it-yourself tech.

Now, more than a decade later, companies have realized that being their own phone company is borderline ridiculous. The time and energy that’s been taken away from highly-skilled, critical IT talent to ensure UC infrastructure is continually up and running has resulted in a plethora of stalled or forgotten business-driving projects, the inability to meet go-to-market goals—and increased attrition rates, where IT folks are simply sick of the nature of UC management.

What does all of this prove? Technology was not the answer.

The good news is that today, a new golden beacon of technology has captured hearts and minds the world over. The cloud (aka UCaaS, or Unified Communications as a Service)—with all its promises of ease-of-use, seamless integrations, not to mention the endless possibilities—is coaxing companies away from their antiquated on-prem solutions with hopes of boundless transformation.

And though they may be right in many respects—the cloud is certainly capable of all of that—the fact remains that someone still must be tasked with managing all of it.

And there is a lot of it.

Of course, many great UCaaS providers have fantastic support, customer service and everything else one could ask for. Unfortunately, in the cloud-based world, no one company will ever survive on one cloud / UCaaS provider alone. That would be too simple, and not how the world works.

As mentioned, seamless integrations are what’s truly driving cloud—and therein lies the new problem. As the entirety of the market migrates to a multi-vendor world, the concept of the “single cloud” will not and cannot apply. Hence, the connective tissue—in this case a UC management platform—is required to ensure that all applications from disparate providers connect and operate as one.

Look at Cisco, 8×8, RingCentral, Microsoft—the list is virtually endless. These solutions are being combined daily to create the perfect, customized environments for companies. However, regardless of how good each one’s respective customer service model may be, these disparate systems care little about one another. Meaning that integrations and holistic management yet again fall squarely on IT’s shoulders—creating the exact same problem that on-prem did, but just in a different environment.

So if IT is desperately trying to escape the trappings of UC-related workloads to better concentrate on other business tasks, what is the answer?

This is where true Unified Communications Solutions companies come to the rescue.

Having highly defined systems, processes, best practices, talent and UC management platforms all under one roof, these companies become the new partner that manage all things UC-related. And if this is starting to sound like a shameless plug for Stack8, perhaps it is—but with merit.

As a UC solutions provider, Stack8 has seen the very best and worst of all things UC-related as we have helped companies evolve into their perfect cloud-based UC solution.

Alleviating the IT burden, allowing IT to once again concentrate on everything else they do in a day, is just the starting point in terms of benefits.

More so, our approach to UCaaS enables countless new processes, better communications and productivity, business intelligence and—most importantly—bringing the human element of user experience to the forefront. It’s all of these things combined, in unison with the technology, that truly transforms business.

The promise of the cloud, UCaaS and—dare I say—Digital Transformation, is not out of reach by any stretch. In fact, we make it simple for businesses to experience all of it.

The real lesson here is for businesses to concentrate on what they do best—while allowing us to do what we do best. The rest will become technological history.