Hosted Unified Communications: Flexibility Sells

In today’s marketplace, there are many factors pushing businesses of all sizes to embrace the cloud for their communications needs. Here are just a few: the growing number of remote workers, the need for more and better team collaboration, the growing use of wireless devices and apps for business communications, and a constant desire to cut costs. Indeed, businesses are starting to see the benefits of the cloud, and Hosted Unified Communications is perfectly positioned to provide many of those benefits. Recent research from IHS Infonetics, focused on North American businesses, reveals this ongoing shift to Hosted UC. According to their findings, by 2016, over 50% of respondents will move their unified communications applications to a cloud environment. Translation: over half of businesses in North America see value in moving their communications services to the cloud and have intentions to do so by next year. “Businesses continue to migrate their unified communications applications to the cloud, citing flexibility as the key reason,” said Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC and IMS at Infonetics Research. “Cloud solutions are inherently more flexible than premise-based solutions, offering businesses the ability to scale users up and down, centralize management and deploy new features and applications quickly.” Other key finding from the IHS Infonetics research include:

• Web conferencing and text messaging are increasingly becoming part of everyday business, reflecting a major shift in user behavior
• By early 2016, 93% of respondents plan to implement video conferencing into their UC solution
• When choosing a unified communications provider, enterprises surveyed ranked product reliability and technology innovation as the most important criteria

Significant New Revenue Opportunity These trends represent a tremendous revenue opportunity for service providers. Small, medium and enterprise-sized business customers are rapidly migrating away from premise-based PBXs and key systems, and opting for the feature-rich, lower cost Hosted Unified Communications solutions. Service providers should position their products to take advantage of this trend. Developing a Hosted UC solution, however, is too great of an investment in time, money and resources for most small service providers. As a partner with service providers since 1996, ANPI recognized this need and has worked diligently over the past few years – investing more than $22 million – to deliver a purposed, made-from-scratch Private Label Hosted Unified Communications Package that empowers wholesale partners to leverage this growing opportunity. Not only will this give providers their own award winning, branded Hosted UC solution, it will create an entirely new revenue stream. Securing a piece of this multi-billion dollar opportunity, though, is not a given. To be competitive, service providers must offer a robust solution that provides a feature-rich, flexible platform and be able to get it to market quickly. The risk of not doing so is great, because losing business customers in today’s market environment has to be avoided at all costs. Utilizing a Hosted UC platform like the ANPI solution can put any service provider in the Hosted UC business within 90 days, empowering them to meet the changing needs of their business customers almost instantly. Interested in publishing a sponsored post to Telecompetitor? Contact us or call 240-450-2161.