Surveys increasingly show that the transition from on-premises systems to unified communications as a service (UCaaS) is driven less by a desire to save money, and more by the greater business agility that UCaaS offers the enterprise. But agility isn’t just about the IT organization gaining flexibility and the capacity to roll out new features quickly. It’s also about giving end users more agility -- specifically, providing them with the platform that best suits the mobile nature of today’s workforce.
The ability to provide a mobile experience that equals or exceeds the non-mobile experience isn’t just a nice-to-have: It’s a requirement. How could it not be, when 52% of all workers and 90% of knowledge workers are mobile, according to industry analyst firm ZK Research?
The only question is how successfully you’ll fulfill this requirement for your end users. The earlier generations of mobile UC have met with mixed success because they didn’t fully integrate UC into the mobile system and device. Most notably, they required a standalone mobile UC app that didn’t integrate with the native dialer and other phone features.
Additionally, features that should be fundamental to mobile business systems have been lacking, too. These include business messaging integration and multi-identity systems that fully satisfy the needs of both the user and the enterprise when employees use their personal phones at work.
UCaaS systems can address these challenges more effectively when they’re tightly integrated to the underlying network that delivers the service. Early-generation UCaaS has been delivered as an over-the-top service, but a UCaaS service that’s integrated into the network can more effectively provide the quality of experience that delivers a true mobile-native experience for the enterprise.
In the coming years, your enterprise will continue to be more mobile, and at the same time it will likely migrate more of its communications to a UCaaS platform. It makes sense to see these developments as two elements of the same strategy, and to seek a UCaaS solution that is best suited for the mobile enterprise. That means understanding the software platform that your provider uses to deliver its service, and the relationship between that software service and the network on which it’s being delivered.
Learn more about how UCaaS is a key factor in mobilizing your workforce in the No Jitter whitepaper written by Zeus Kerravala of ZK Research and sponsored by Metaswitch, “Mobility: The Next Frontier for Unified Communications.”
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