When you invest in a unified communications (UC) and voice solution, one of your top priorities must be flexibility.
It can be difficult to predict the needs of your business and of your employees in the years to come. And to further complicate the issue, technology evolves at such a rapid pace that it is nearly impossible to know what requirements you might be faced with in the future.
For example, it wasn’t so long ago that the mobility capabilities of VoIP were disregarded as unnecessary by many companies. Why would you want the ability to have a business phone at home? Now – mobility is essential to the modern workforce. Telecommuting from a home office has become a widespread practice in a few short years.
Another example is the BYOD trend. The amount and variety of devices accessing business IP networks has undergone a vast expansion recently. Tablets, smartphones, and laptops of different models and makes all vie for their share of bandwidth, using features from messaging to video and audio, and more.
While we can make market predictions based on trends, predicting the exact nature of your business’s future needs is a challenge.
Your best option, then, is to go for a solution and a provider that offers flexibility.
You don’t want to get stuck with an unyielding solution that can’t transition to meet your changing needs; replacing a system and/or finding a new provider is a costly and time-consuming endeavor. And not evolving with the times can result in your company losing its competitive edge.
Here are some of the questions you should ask your vendor when deciding on a UC or voice solution:
- Do you offer end-user alternatives to the traditional desk phone?
- Do you offer mobility features, such as soft phones, voicemail to email, etc.
- Do you offer flexible deployments?
- Is the system available as a hardware appliance or software on a server?
- Is the software available on an industry-standard server or virtualized server?
- Do you offer cloud-based services? Do you offer on-premise services?
- Do you offer resilient services with hybridized on-site and hosted services?
- Are the solutions you offer up-to-date? Will you keep our systems up-to-date?
- How do you respond to changing technology requirements?
When you are choosing a vendor for your UC and voice solution, don’t forget to consider flexibility as a key deciding factor, along with cost, scale, resiliency, and applications.
>> Activo would be happy to discuss your company’s UC and voice needs and answer any questions you may have about flexible solutions. Contact us today.
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