The journey to the cloud is a complex one, particularly with the ongoing move to a hybrid working culture thrown into the mix.
The process is made no simpler by the fact that many businesses are deciding not to go all-in with one vendor, instead opting for a multi-platform approach.
This makes a consulting partner a crucial component of the migration process, according to Intrado Vice President, Marcus Schmidt.
He told UC Today that the pandemic has triggered a wave of businesses migrating their voice infrastructure to the cloud.
“Everybody has scrambled to figure out what they’re going to do with both meetings and voice,” he said.
“We have seen tremendous moves towards the cloud on the voice side. Some customers were fairly well positioned when it came to sending everybody home, but the people that weren’t ready had to kick it into high gear quickly.”
Schmidt’s view is supported by a recent Intrado research report, which found that 35 per cent of businesses moved their telephony to the cloud before the pandemic struck, with 25 per cent migrating due to covid restrictions. Just three per cent of respondents said they had no plans to move to a cloud phone system.
The endorsement of the cloud is clear to see, and so is the backing of a multi-vendor approach. Some 49 percent of businesses said they used a variety of cloud-based videoconferencing and collaboration platforms such as Teams, Zoom or Webex.
Just 27 percent of businesses said they use a single cloud-based solution, with the remaining businesses yet to move to the cloud.
This creates a challenge, Schmidt said.
“There are a lot of decisions about multiple technology options and most customers don’t want to go all-in with one,” he explained. “They want to hedge their bets.
“For example, they might want to stay with Cisco for core telephony in a contact centre but then use Teams for messages and meetings. Then they want to find a way to make them play nicely together, which we can do.
“We’ve got long-standing partnerships with both Cisco and Microsoft, as well as our own technology, so we can help businesses bring everything together because there isn’t a one-size-fits-all option, particularly for midsize and larger businesses.”
Now the panic of the early pandemic has subsided, businesses are likely to take a more strategic approach to their cloud migration moving forward.
When planned properly, this migration can be an opportunity rather than a burden; it gives businesses with disparate systems the chance to take stock and consolidate.
“It’s a good chance to wipe the slate clean and start a fresh but most customers aren’t going to do it all in one shot,” Schmidt said.
“Even if it’s a customer that has an on-prem system, we can start them on the cloud journey with something just as simple as SIP trunking.
“We can pull our SIP trunking into their on-prem system and then when they decide to move to Teams or our PBX in the cloud we can just redirect it somewhere else.”
Teams Voice
The growth of Teams over the last 18 months is undisputed, with the platform now hitting 145 million daily active users.
The uptake of voice services connected to Teams, however, is not revealed by Microsoft and therefore harder to gauge.
But the research from Intrado found that 50 percent of firms have extended their use of Teams to include voice capabilities, with a further 38 percent planning to do so this year.
“It’s pretty amazing that people are willing to say, ‘We’ve already invested this much in Teams so I’m going to make it my phone system’.
“Operator Connect, of which we’re fortunate enough to be one of the early partners, is only going to accelerate that.
“We’re going to be able to seamlessly integrate regular PSTN into teams, as well as audio conferencing, so it’s great to be able to do both of those”
from UC Today https://ift.tt/2TfNRME
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