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Part Two: Modularity, Biometrics, and Smart Energy

The New Year is here, and our IT and Unified Communications experts are excited to present the trends and technologies that we believe will power The Smart Enterprise in 2014.

Part one of our series discussed the benefits and flexibility Advanced Mobility, Software Defined Tools, and High Availability can bring to the enterprise. In part two, we’ll take a look at additional trends that are becoming increasingly popular in helping businesses reduce costs.

Modularity

CIOs in the past have been very conservatively attached to their data centers. But the slow economic growth, reduction in IT budgets, and increase in cost of skilled IT workers has propelled a growing need for newer approaches to manage infrastructure assets. CIO’s are more vulnerable, and are looking to align enterprise IT services and strategies with expanding business requirements.

Alignment can be a complex endeavor, particularly in deciding where and how to deploy new equipment to accommodate current and future increases in demand. Modularity allows you to invest only in what is needed today, which reflects well on the company’s bottom line. It also allows for trimming up-front costs while leaving open the possibility of expanding or incorporating new technologies in the future.

Cloud-based services offer distinct cases for modularity. Modularity becomes more than just dividing physical space, but rather the allocation of specifc functions or workloads to an off-premises facility. Companies maintain the ability to deploy applications across the full range of today’s alternatives (physical, virtual, private cloud, public cloud) but benefit from the OPEX savings, and thus remain cost-competitive in their markets.

Biometrics

In recent years, performance improvement and cost reduction of sensors and processing technologies has spurred data collection and information extraction across a wide range of industry sectors.

Authentication by biometric verification—which is completed based on biological attributes of the person accessing the technology—is becoming increasingly common in corporate and public security systems, consumer electronics, and point of sale (POS) applications.

Biometric technology has matured rapidly over recent years. It helps travelers who’ve passed background checks move quickly through expedited security lines at airports. It permits first responders to be given instant admittance to an incident scene—and to be routed to exactly where they’re needed. It also protects our ports, federal buildings, and government resources by giving access to the individuals whose identities have been scrutinized and verified, while helping law enforcement secure those who have not.

Biometric software can composite fingerprint scans, retinal scans, geometric patterning (facial markers and body contours), and voice files and use them to recognize certain parties, enabling speedy and secure contextual interactions.

In addition to security, the driving force behind biometric verification has been convenience, as its use helps quickly make identifications within large numbers of people.

Smart Energy

Buildings consume approximately 40 percent of the world’s energy— far more than the transportation sector, according to The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). Regardless of age, nearly every building wastes energy. Buildings, the equipment used within, and tenants all represent a complex, interdependent system. Every structure runs differently, and energy consumption profiles and concerns differ across locations and structures, and seasons and occupancy levels. Advanced energy-saving solutions must cater to both time as well as place.

This is why Information and Communications Technology will play an increasingly vital role in an energy efficient society required to balance energy supply and demand.

Smart Buildings achieve enhanced environmental and economic performance by producing, storing, efficiently managing, and optimally controlling energy.

Energy waste can be minimized through systems that use individuals’ location information to enable automatic control of air conditioning and lighting. These systems control energy usage and enhance security by providing the positioning data of the people inside the buildings.
Within enterprises and data centers there will be an important focus on energy efficient technologies that help save power. Advances in renewable energy technology will also allow for the collection of kinetic energy, which now is usually wasted.

Our experts know that evaluating your company’s IT and Communications Solutions can be stressful. If you’ve been tasked with reducing costs and increasing efficiency, these are just a few of the solutions that you could consider to increase positive results. Since you have the option to choose the technology, solution, or strategy that makes the most sense for your business, be sure to read our first post in this series which covers other solutions that can help.

If you’re ready to learn all 10 Enterprise IT & Communication Trends for 2014, you can skip forward and download our eBook now.

Part One: Advanced Mobility, Software Defined Tools, and High Availability

With the start of the new calendar year fast approaching and businesses making plans to find new software and technology solutions for employees, now seems to be the perfect time to share the trends and technologies that we believe will drive productivity and build more flexible work environments for our customers in the coming year.

Many IT and Communications Trends from 2013 will be as prevalent this year as last. This portion of our two part blog series on The Smart Enterprise in 2014 covers returning IT and Communications trends that will help you maintain your competitive edge and keep current with the rapidly evolving Unified Communications technologies in today’s marketplace.

Advanced Mobility

As technology has progressed, employee presence in the workplace has evolved. In 2014, employees are going to continue to be mobile, and will be traveling or telecommuting even more than the previous year. These employees will continue to need access to data and applications in non-stationary locales.

As long as this trend continues, your employees will continue to require a fully-functional mobile work environment.  To today’s employee, location is unimportant, but presence and status remain crucial.

Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) capabilities offer communication services independent of access technique. FMC supports smartphones as an integrated extension of the company network, meaning it can be accessed from any location at any time via a WiFi connection. Mobile devices can then be used in conjunction with enterprise security credentials—thus simultaneously securing enterprise information and supporting ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) policies.

Software Defined Tools

Software-Defined tools are the definition of new improved standards for infrastructure programmability and data center interoperability. Driven by automation and cloud computing, software defined technologies provide you with simple, cost-effective tools that are built on collaboration.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN), for example, provides technology to extract network architecture and make network devices programmable.

The goal of SDN is to allow network engineers and administrators to respond quickly to changing enterprise conditions. In a software-defined network, a network administrator can shape traffic from a centralized control console without having to touch individual switches. The administrator can change any network switch's rules when necessary -- prioritizing, de-prioritizing, or even blocking specific types of packets with a very granular level of control.

This is especially helpful in a cloud computing multi-tenant architecture because it allows the administrator to manage traffic loads in fast, flexible, and efficient means.

High Availability

Numerous organizations depend on generic or specific IT applications in their day to day operation and services, which is why providing these businesses with solutions that provide continuous operation of essential systems is vital for us.

IT has become a matter of providing services 24 hours a day, 365 days a year across countries. As a result, IT systems need to be extremely reliable, and, the application of High Availability in IT systems becomes one of the most important implementations in IT strategies.

IT managers need to protect data and applications, from sudden hardware, OS and application failures to sudden natural disasters. To achieve a high level of operational uptime, infrastructure components must be fault tolerant with the ability to recover from complex failures. This is all the more important in mission-critical environments, such as healthcare, banking, insurance, e-commerce or web services.

A virtualized infrastructure improves business continuity. A clustering solution can be key to continuing the workflow on standby systems without stopping business operations when failure strikes. This can be clustering software or fault tolerant server solutions delivering exceptional uptime through dual modular hardware redundancy. These servers provide continuous availability through hardware redundancy in all components: processors, memory, motherboards, I/O, hard disk drives, and cooling fans for optimal data integrity.

While some of these trends will accelerate, others likely won’t. NEC experts, however, expect all of these technologies and developments to help organizations drive productivity and bring new, powerful solutions to businesses everywhere.

Wondering what else NEC experts predict for next year? We’ll continue to uncover what IT and Communications will look like in 2014 in part two of our blog series on The Smart Enterprise. 

To learn more about these technologies, download our eBook: Smart Trends Enterprise Trends 2014: 10 Strategic Drivers that Will Empower the Smart Enterprise.

Many organizations are improving communications through the virtualization of real time applications such as voice and unified communications (UC). All the financial and practical benefits of traditional server virtualization still apply as companies consolidate voice and UC into their data center. Namely: reduced capital expense, improved efficiencies, reduced risk, plus the savings on operational expenses since voice and UC can be managed with all other business applications on shared infrastructure. While the concept of virtualization has been around for a long time, it continues to be a leading trend in the transformation of data centers as organizations find new ways to reduce costs and improve efficiencies.

While hardware and energy expenses are the obvious savings, organizations sometimes overlook the reductions in operating costs. These savings can be drastic, especially in highly distributed organizations. The ability to easily manage your voice and UC in conjunction with other business application simplifies administration. It makes server testing, deployment and policy compliance easier as installations can be created from standard images. There are also IT benefits as it relates to the support of remote sites. When you have dedicated servers for individual applications managed by remote staff it can get really expensive. The common server infrastructure and application can reduce the remote site IT support staff requirements. Additionally, backup or clustered instances of your telephony, audio/video conferences and unified communications applications at your remote sites can play a critical role with load balancing and fail-over. This can add tremendous benefits to your business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) plans.

Reduced costs

With virtualization there are a number of benefits seen when it comes to reduced costs. First, there’s reduced hardware expenses. Virtualization vendors once touted claims as high as 50 to 100 virtual machines on a single physical server, but, even if you go with a conservative 10:1 consolidation ratio, there’s still significant savings on hardware costs and maintenance. Now that leading voice and UC applications are offered as purely software-based solutions, you can add telephony, audio/video conferencing, unified messaging, contact center, etc. to your data center on the standard off-the-shelf servers you are familiar with.

Reduced power consumption is a nice added cost savings. Organizations can become more energy efficient through server consolidation as a smaller number of fully utilized servers consume far less power than a large number of under-utilized ones. Additionally, there are real estate, cooling, and backup power savings that go along with the smaller footprint, not to mention the aesthetics of a clean data center.

Improved efficiencies

Virtualized server environments have a number of advantages when it comes to improved efficiencies and simplified administration that are often not available with physical servers. Advantages like live migration, storage migration, fault tolerance, high availability and distributed resource planning help you maximize uptime of your critical applications like voice and UC. These virtualization technologies keep your virtual machines up and running and give them the ability to quickly recover from unplanned outages. The ability to easily backup and move from one virtual machine to another is one of the best business continuity benefits out there. Additionally, combining these software advantages with fault tolerant servers can create a rock solid environment where it’s needed.

In addition to business continuity, disaster recovery for your communications is greatly improved in a virtualized environment. By reducing the number of physical servers required to run your operation, you have a complete backup solution at a remote site as we mentioned above, or in the cloud at a co-lo facility or offered as a service from your system integrator. In the past, this type of backup solution was cost prohibitive for most. The DR site had to have the exact, often proprietary, hardware configuration as the production site. This can be very costly and an administration nightmare to keep in sync. Now, through virtualization, this type of DR plan is more affordable and easier to maintain. One thing to consider as you plan to virtualize your communications is how your vendor prices user software licenses. Make sure you are not paying for the idle voice and UC licenses that are part of your disaster recovery plan.

For those of us that have suffered from server sprawl, we know all too well how this begins. The server room starts off clean, tidy and with plenty of physical space, but one-by-one we continued to add additional applications that required a dedicated server. Critical applications like voice, contact centers and unified messaging once required isolated processing power, memory and storage space to satisfy business requirements. Now that these applications no longer require proprietary dedicated servers, IT departments can escape the server vender lock that once limited options. Virtualization provides an ideal way for organizations to minimize the number of servers needed. By creating virtual machines that meet the exact requirements, you can overcome the hardware limitation and latency issues that prevented the virtualization of real time applications like voice communications in the past.

There is one common theme across all IT organizations in today’s economic environment – to do more with less. Virtualization is a great way to improve your organization’s communications and provide higher quality services with less hardware, lower costs, and reduced administration hassle. Click below to learn how NEC’s software-based unified communications applications have advanced the virtualization strategies of numerous organizations.

In part one of our series, we took a dive into Gary Audin's eBook, entitled "The Ultimate Guide to Unified Communications."  Audin's publication gives an in-depth look on how to evaluate which UC approach is right for you. Read along as we dive deeper into the rest of the book and the pros and cons of the approaches to UC implementation.

7. Your Business Model Defines Your Communications Model

Your organization’s business model will have profound influence on the implementation of UC. Ask yourself the following questions in the process:

• Does my organization have the financial strength to use capital (CAPEX) funds or the ability to borrow the capital?
• If the capital is not available, does my organization favor expensing the costs of IT implementation through outside services?
• Does our IT staff have the training, knowledge, and experience to implement an on-premises system? If not, do we want to retain a VAR to implement and manage the on-premises system? 
• How are my competitors implementing UC?

8. The UC Implementation Decision

In the process of UC Implementation you may find yourself asking “should we install and manage our own system or use a completely outside cloud-based UC service?” The answer depends, not only on security, staffing and economics, but also what is the best method to introduce the UC menu of features to your users.

There are three possible solutions available to you for implementing and supporting Unified Communications (UC):

• Purchase a complete system and locate it at your data center(s)
• Use a service that is remote with access through a private network (MPLS) or the Internet
• Combine these solutions into a hybrid implementation, gaining the advantages of both

9. The On Premises Solution

Implementing an on-premises solution provides high levels of security and control, and lowers the implementation and operational risks. A major risk you can run into with a cloud service provider is service availability/reliability, since the cloud provider is not likely to include Internet access in their Service Level Agreement (SLA).

The major cost component of buying a UC system is the software licenses. Once the first year of ownership has passed, the primary costs to your organization are software subscription, maintenance, and data center facilities. These latter costs add up to far less than subscribing to cloud services over time.

10. Subscribing to Cloud Communications Services

If you’re facing budget constraints, it can make the up-front costs of implementing on-premises UC solutions from scratch a moot issue. Like many enterprises, you will likely want to avoid any new capital costs, making a cloud solution that is expensed with little or no capital impact more desirable. Why? Because the cost is fixed per month based on the number of users and the individule features used, so is a predictable and more easily budgeted operating expense.

Cloud based UC services can also be subscribed to by feature set, such as providing video collaboration for a single department, allowing greater flexibility for your organization when determining what UC features should be offered to what users. Many enterprises implement a few UC features to begin with, and observe their use to determine what the feature benefits and ROI will be for other areas within the enterprise.

11. The Hybrid Approach; Cloud plus Premises System

A hybrid solution allows your organization to get the best of both worlds. With a hybrid solution you can integrate functions that are required for the entire organization, while using the cloud to offer specific functions unique to individuals or departments. This capability occurs without the expense of enabling functions for departments that do not need them. If cloud costs begin to exceed the cost of on-site implementations, you can convert functions from the cloud to premises-based. The hybrid approach can also deliver business continuity failover services at a much lower cost.

As you move forward in deciding how you will implement Unified Communications within your organization, keep in mind that there is no right or wrong approach -- you have to choose what works best for you. If you are ready for a guide to UC, click below to download the eBook that includes a comprehensive checklist on evaluating the best approach for your business. The checklist highlights factors such as the financial, technical and staff support impacts each system can have on your organization.

HITEC begins today, and our NEC hospitality team is looking forward to the trends that we will be seeing on the show floor. Here are some of our predictions:

Customer Compatibility
In my November blog post BYOD: Expanding to Hospitality, I referenced a Pew Research report that noted that more than half of all mobile phone users rely on their portable device to search for information on hotels. With mobility, you can get everything you want, where you want, plus gain positive benefits in revenue, guest experience and marketing. With the steadily increasing volume of mobile network users, what better time for a hospitality business to embrace the guest BYOD trend and get them more connected to your business than ever before.

Guest Experience
The bottom line of any investment decision is guest experience. Does it improve guest experience? Will this be guests’ expectations moving forward? Will this keep my guest satisfied? And will this help their decision to return? The right services, staff training and communications systems are essential in order to maximize guest satisfaction and return stays. When you see new and existing technologies on the show floor, think about what the trickle-down effect is. If, in the end, it does not improve the guest experience, you may want to reconsider your investments.

Unified Communications
Small to mid-sized properties make up the majority of all hotels in North America. NEC recognizes that hotel operators have increased pressure, in today's tough economic times, to maintain superior guest services while improving staff efficiency and lowering overall operating costs. At HITEC, NEC will be demonstrating UNIVERGE 3C for Hospitality – an innovative, affordable unified communications solution specifically tailored for the burgeoning mid-sized hotel market and built on the proven, award winning UNIVERGE 3C software platform - a flexible, scalable, reliable and cost effective IP PBX.

During HITEC 2013, NEC will also demonstrate how its solutions help organizations provide the best guest experience possible by being and staying connected. It will showcase its latest UNIVERGE® UC&C and Cloud technologies, which are designed to help organizations be more mobile, connected, collaborative and productive. Additionally, NEC will be introducing biometrics solutions to help hospitality organizations improve customer engagement.

Stop by booth #907 to experience all of these solutions. Not going to HITEC 2013? Follow us on the floor at @NEC and use the official hashtag #HITEC. Check out the video below to see how NEC has helped hotels around the world recover missed revenue opportunities, increase customer service, and enhance the overall guest experience.

In part one of this series, we dug into top trends to help your business increase efficiency and reduce costs. As we dive into the rest of the list, we’ll show you how mobile apps, storage management, social media and other evolving trends can give you a competitive edge.

VI. Mobile Applications

When mobile apps first made their appearance, the offerings consisted of strictly general productivity needs and information retrieval; email, calendar, contacts and weather information for example. Fast forward a few years and driven by increased public demand developers have created advanced mobile apps with capabilities such as GPS and location-based services, banking, order tracking, and ticket purchases. Not only has this increased functionality created a rise in the popularity of mobile applications, but it has generated a shift in the desire for mobility from strictly personal to business and corporate use. According to an Appcelerator survey, 55 percent of companies ranked mobility at the top or near the top of their priorities list, and 66 percent plan employee-facing mobile applications.

VII. Contextual Data, Analytics and Interaction

Contextual data spans the last mile of personal and business productivity: ‘Meta-information’ accompanies voice, video, chat and text communications to provide more comprehensive context for our interactions. Analytics is increasingly delivered to users at the point of action and in context. With the improvement of performance and reduction in cost to develop and implement, IT leaders can afford to perform analytics and simulation on nearly every action taken in the business. This change will lead to greater flexibility and agility within the workplace. For example, mobile workers are most efficient when they have immediate visibility of team member status so they can reach others in a timely manner when they need to do so. Contextually aware presence gives these employees the ability to receive information on content, tools, and services based on contextual information, such as the geographical location, personal preferences, and current activities of group members. To take it a step further integrating mobile devices with Unified Communications (UC) software allows end users to use mobile devices for collaborations and to locate other end users, whether they are on-site or off. This can be essential in healthcare where patients may require immediate assistance from medical staff or colleagues.

VIII. Big Data and Storage Management

As businesses of all sizes begin taking advantage of the capabilities of big data and analytics, they are also encountering the inevitable downside; complications when trying to store, protect, and manage the growing pool of data and related resources. Current methods require them to constantly configure, provision and upgrade their servers and storage devices, all the while technology enhancements put on the pressure to undergo migrations. So how can this be addressed? First, analyze the value of the data you have. Enterprises are deploying Big Data projects to leverage their current data and drive better business intelligence, product development and customer service. The surge in data will drive storage solutions to become fore flexible and scalable without the need for users to have a refined skillset in order to manage.

IX. Smart Energy

Information and Communications Technology will play an increasingly vital role in an energy efficient society, particularly given how essential it is to automatically balance energy supply and demand. Smart Buildings will achieve enhanced environmental and economic performance by producing, storing, efficiently managing and optimally controlling energy. Building energy management systems will play an increasingly vital role in these Smart Buildings. Energy waste is in turn minimized by obtaining location information for individuals to enable automatically controlling air conditioning and lighting. This is of particular interest to enterprises and data centers that will place an increasing focus on energy-saving technologies such as virtualization.

X. Social Media and Interaction

Although seen typically as a customer-facing technology only, many businesses have begun utilizing social media as an integrated element in their business process to facilitate improvement in all areas. From product testing and validation, exerting market influence, prospecting and lead generation to customer care and retention, the value of social media activities is continually increasing and expanding. The value of this activity is being quantified and routinely measured as part of the regular business process.

Companies are also reinventing their customer engagement models to more quickly and effectively respond to customer care issues via social media. Promotions are the top drivers of consumer engagement through social media, so businesses need to build new linkages between marketing and sales. Furthermore, customer support services increasingly use social media sites to share information with customers and provide more interactive support for them.

Hopefully these 10 tips have given you an idea on how you can empower your workforce without having to sacrifice additional cost or efficiency. Don’t forget to start at post 1 for the first set of tips, or to see the complete list, download the eBook.

Part I

Competing in today’s business environment is about meeting challenges, making decisions and innovating rapidly while using the best and most current technologies, tools and information.

Cloud services, mobile applications and virtualization are just a few components of a rapidly evolving technology foundation.  Check out this list of trends and technologies that we believe will drive productivity and provide businesses with superior customer service, a more flexible work environment and a competitive edge.

I. Unified Communications and Collaboration Reduce Latency and Drive Productivity

With organizations becoming increasingly fragmented, departments more flexible and employees more mobile, collaboration is a means of enabling them to work together in real time. Unifed Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) is a major breakthrough in enterprise communications, as it will drive productivity and increase flexibility across an organization. Latencies in all areas will be reduced as well, from development to logistics and customer response, thereby creating an informed and connected workplace. Advanced collaboration tools such as shared workspace, calendar coordination, and rich presence will support many business processes. As a result, collaboration between individuals and teams will intensify and improve in quality.

II. Mobile Connectivity is Key

In today’s fexible and fast-moving business environment, employees are never in one place for very long. Workers can be just about anywhere: at the offce, between appointments, on business travel or working from home. In many business settings, it has become more important to reach a specifc person regardless of their location. Additionally, more employees need a mobile device that supports all business telephone features and provides access to the Internet as well as business applications. Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) capabilities offer communication services independent of the access technique. With FMC, employees can use smartphones anywhere in the world as an integrated extension of the company network, enabling access to the central directory and switching from a cellular network to a Wi-Fi network. In addition, personal devices can be used in conjunction with enterprise security credentials – securing enterprise information and supporting ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) policies.

III. Open Architectures and Standards (such as SIP) provide Greater Flexibility

Globalization of business and technologies leads to solutions being comprised of components from multiple sources. UC&C solutions should be built on an open architecture that lets organizations leverage existing technologies. SIP is the foundation for integration of media modes, network devices, and applications across a common infrastructure to deliver advanced services and applications. SIP is a core communication component, which integrates with other advanced protocols to support a multimedia architecture and supports advanced communications across any device. It also enables virtual applications to be delivered from the cloud to support conferencing, messaging, voice, and collaboration.

The move to SIP trunking is signifcant because it enables organizations to reduce costs and offer new services. SIP trunking is beginning to replace local PRI lines and route external traffic to centralized data centers, allowing enterprises to lower the operating costs of IP technology while using their existing network resources more efficiently.

IV. Beyond Virtualization

Many organizations are turning to virtualization as the solution to their IT challenges. Virtualization accelerates deployment of new capabilities without needing to acquire new hardware. A virtualized infrastructure can improve your business through the minimization of capital expenses and operating costs.

It also helps reduce application testing requirements and compatibility issues while simplifying disaster recovery and mission critical solutions. Virtualization provides components to address end-to-end scenarios, like datacenter consolidation, business continuity and virtualized desktop solutions – ultimately providing you the benefits of a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

V. Hybrid Clouds

There is a bright future in the midst of hybrid clouds. Cloud computing is changing the enterprise’s approach to IT and communications, with more fexible architectures and cost structures. Modular applications enable you to pay for only those applications your business needs for a specifc period of time. These on-demand services allow businesses to better manage costs. Businesses are also turning to the cloud to enable more scalable and flexible business processes. While they use public clouds for less sensitive tasks, they prefer to use private clouds for their most vital processing tasks. 

Then there’s hybrid clouds, which are designed to quickly scale to a company’s needs. It makes it the ideal solution to load heavy projects, which cannot be easily handled by a company’s in-house servers. Hybrid clouds can be operated at all times, from any part of the world.

In part two, we’ll cover additional technology trends.  Download the eBook now for more details on empowering your workforce with these leading technologies.  

Unified Communications (UC) technology is rapidly evolving, and with this change, there is an ongoing pressure for CIOs to stay current if they want to remain competitive. As technology continues to evolve, CIOs have the added pressure to update existing technology or deploy a new solution in half the time, with half the budget – and in some cases with half the resources available to them. With only one to two years to adapt before what’s “current” becomes yesterday’s technology, you certainly want to implement communications technology solutions that rapidly adapts to changes in order to provide your business with the most current communications software and applications available for your business to stay competitive and productive. Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) could be the solution to address this critical business need.

UCaaS is a complete service offering that can be implemented into your IT strategy over a defined period of time. With UCaas, services are delivered from the cloud, enabling your business to quickly and easily scale communications as needed and choose your preferred deployment model, be it a private, hybrid or public cloud environment. UCaaS allows for flexibility based on your requirements, and puts you in a position to make decisions based on your business practices and specific needs – not the needs of the manufacturer. The following are just a few ways deploying UCaaS prepares you to face IT challenges that may come your way.

• Empowers your business’ workforce

With UCaaS, businesses of all sizes can make a significant impact to their overall costs, IT efficiencies and individual productivity. Because UCaaS delivers a complete set of voice features and unified communications (UC) and collaboration applications, you can consolidate your communications staff. What implications does this have for your business? For starters, consolidating helps decrease overall spending. What’s more, you can simultaneously increase individual productivity, responsiveness and accessibility. Deploying UCaaS helps leverage the abilities of your IT staff to focus on other business issues. With UCaaS, gone are the days when your IT team ties up a majority of their time dealing with testing, scheduling and installing new software updates.

• Enables True Collaboration 

Ideally, all departments and levels in a corporation should interact with one another to collaborate toward a common goal – UCaaS helps make this possible by offering the ability for you to achieve on-demand access across any device. With a comprehensive suite of powerful UC and collaboration applications, your business will quickly and easily be able to streamline communications and information delivery. Deploying UCaas in your organization will provide a consistent user experience across multiple devices which, in turn, minimize the need for training so the user’s time can be dedicated to other tasks. The evolution of UCaaS has spanned from basic features such as Unified Messaging, Presence and IM to an ever expanding set of new capabilities. UCaaS enables your employees to tailor their communications to the specific needs of their role, plus gives total control over how, when and where they choose to be reached.

• Eases Budget and Management Concerns

We’d all like to reduce, and if possible, eliminate hardware costs altogether but still receive all the features and benefits of our applications, right? Gartner predicts that by 2015, 35% of technology spending won't be controlled by IT but by the business. So, with that in mind, remember the following about UCaas: (1) Since UCaas is consistently upgraded, there is no need to budget, purchase, and install hardware upgrades, so critical IT resources can be dedicated to other projects that help your business to compete better in the market. (2) With UCaaS, you have upfront clear per-user costs, which simplify the service you offer your organization. You decide what you need and when. For example, you can purchase communications as an Operating Expense (OPEX) for a fraction of the upfront costs that you’d incur in a traditional Capital Expense (CAPEX) model – simply choose the solution(s) that best suit your needs at limited or no upfront cost (3) UCaas is also offered at consistent and predictable costs, which reduces the headache of searching for additional budget to fund costly projects.

• Offers flexible UC options

With UCaaS, standard UC features (with varying functionality) are offered on a per-seat basis. This means that the monthly seat cost includes system requirements needed to for you to leverage the functions of your UC system. Just because UCaaS consists of a standard set of offerings, you can still implement an offering that doesn’t require all users to be at the same level. For example, a phone in a public area for general use shouldn’t cost the same as the applications delivered to your CEO. The flexibility to customize these options, along with the ability to add on additional features to meet specific needs, ensures that you’re delivering a service that’s valued by the organization.

Check out the CIO.com webinar to learn more about how implementing UCaaS can help your business successfully overcome technology challenges without risking your ability to stay competitive.

If you’re implementing Unified Communications, you can likely attest that it’s a great communications facilitation tool.  But the cloud has opened new opportunities to merge communications networks with critical data needs by providing Unified Communications as a Service, or UCaaS. With UCaaS, dial tone, data, conferencing, and a host of additional features and applications can be delivered directly to your business, and all managed from the cloud. Ideally, all departments and levels in a corporation should interact with one another to collaborate toward a common goal. UCaaS helps make this possible.

UCaaS, provides a unified, centralized location for multiple communications mediums such as email, VoIP, mobile phones, office phones and home phones. In deploying UCaaS, you eliminate your business’ need to purchase and maintain on-premise servers and equipment for communications, resulting in significant up-front cost savings. UCaaS not only increases employee productivity, but can also save your organization thousands on capital costs. This Accenture report cites research from Gartner stating that by 2014, the cloud-based market will be worth $55 billion annually. Do you think your business can benefit from deploying UCaaS? We do, read on to find out why.

Increased availability and efficiency of IT staff

When you deploy UCaaS, you consolidate your communications systems, which helps leverage the abilities of your IT staff to focus on other business issues. For example, UC as a Service automatically includes updates new features that are released. What does this mean for your IT team? It means there is no longer a need for their time to be tied up dealing with testing, scheduling and installing new software updates There is also no need to budget, purchase, and install hardware upgrades, so critical IT resources can be dedicated to other projects that help your business run faster, jump higher, and be more competitive in the market.

You are also likely to have staff that rely heavily on mobility and remain accessible through their mobile phones, softphones, or other wireless devices when out of the office. UC helps employees remain productive even when they are not in the office.  Now that UC capabilities are delivered through the cloud, mobile workers can check the availability of resources in the office with a UC client on their mobile device. Knowing that status information is updated automatically, whether they’re on the phone, in a meeting, or on vacation, allows everyone to remain productive– even when they’re away.

Scales to fit your business

With UCaaS, you are putting the service to work for you, meaning you only pay for what you need. Since you’re paying for services on a per user/per month basis, you won’t be wasting resources on unused capacity. So what happens if the size of your business changes? No problem. If your business is growing, many UCaaS providers give you the flexibility to add more seats to accommodate growth. What about the flexibility to decrease if needed? Should it become necessary to reduce staff, you shouldn’t be stuck in a long term contract, and with UCaaS, you’re not. You can reduce your users on a per month/per user basis. You can gain from the elasticity of utilizing the cloud model – a major benefit of UC as a Service.

Increased Reliability

With the right design, UCaaS can offer higher levels of resiliency and redundancy than you will find with a typical on-premises system cost effectively. There are different designs to fit your business needs. For example, your data can be instantly backed up and replicated in multiple data centers for disaster-proof business communications. Be sure to select a UCaaS provider whose data center not only meets the highest requirements for physical security, but can also be monitored 24x7, offers the latest encryption and security protocols available and undergoes constant scrutiny to protect your company’s data from intrusion and security violations.

With UCaaS, Disaster Recovery applications are also an option for your communications and data. With these applications, you can choose delivery methods including: public, hybrid or private cloud models. For the highest level of redundancy you could even choose to have a 100% redundant, on-site backup of your entire communications platform, ensuring no downtime in the unlikely event of an emergency. The level of redundancy is up to you, but the increased reliability of UCaaS provides rock-solid design at a fraction of the cost you’d incur if you built it on your own.

You’ve likely assessed the impact moving to the cloud will have on your organization. We hope this has helped you take another step toward preparing for that change to allow your business to work faster, collaborate faster and communicate faster with UCaaS.

 For additional stats and benefits of cloud communications download the infographic.

We recently concluded our first annual Customer Technology Expo (CTE) in Tampa, Florida. Held back-to-back right after the NEC Advantage Conference for our dealer community, the new, expanded conference, complete with a new name, built upon the success of the NEC Users Group and added additional NEC technology to the mix. A variety of information sessions were available that covered NEC Servers & Storage with the award winning ProgramableFlow, NEC Displays, the latest in facial recognition software from Japan.  There was also a surprise appearance from our good friend PaPeRo.

Day 1

NEC Users Group president Mark Reynolds opened the conference, followed by the first keynote speaker Michael Vickers’ “Becoming Preferred” presentation.

A unique aspect of the expo is that attendees are provided with the opportunity to talk with NEC executives first-hand. The executives were in attendance to outline the company’s roadmap for the future and the importance of the North American market as we begin the transition to software and cloud offerings. 

To elaborate on how NEC is preparing for the transition, Ram Menghani, NEC Vice President of Product Management, gave a detailed outlook on the recent UNIVERGE 3C and UNIVERGE Cloud Services (UCaaS) announcements. 

 There were breakout sessions galore, with topics ranging from “Can We UC&C with BYOD?” to “Software Assurance 101,” and, as usual, the technical training sessions proved to be a big hit.

For those looking for insight into rolling out UC and the software based UNIVERGE 3C in their enterprise deployments, there were customer-led planning and implementation best practices sessions with great planning tips provided by Northwest College.

All of this was just day one…

Day 2

Day two started off with the “New Standard for Business Communications” presented by Marty Parker. No stuffy presentations here – an exciting feature of the day was a live, interactive demo of the UNIVERGE 3C Client, with a multi-continent collaboration session provided by Senior Vice President Todd Landry.

Following the demo was a series of breakout sessions which included Martha Buyer’s breakdown of E911 risks and tips on how to minimize them.

Day 3

After all was said and done, it was time for the final sessions. The Expo wrapped up with Gail Kasek’s “Outside In: SMB Solutions for Remote Workers” which was both beneficial and informative, given the number of remote workers in organizations is on the rise. All in all, the expo proved to be just what it promised: customer-led and customer focused. We are already looking forward to the 2nd annual event in 2013! To stay informed and learn more about next year's event subscribe to the blog.