Unifying communications and integrating them with other business applications can boost efficiency across the workplace. In a high-use scenario, you could wind up paying more per month with subscription pricing than with a PBX system, especially since the PBX is likely paid for.īut UCaaS doesn’t operate in isolation, notes Denise Lund, research vice president for worldwide unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) and telecom at IDC. That can get away from you, cautions Megan Fernandez, senior principal analyst on the technology and service provider team at Gartner. Like every other “as a service,” UCaaS pricing scales up with use. And while a PBX uses expensive proprietary hardware installed in your facilities, UCaaS requires no special hardware, just a high-bandwidth internet connection. UCaaS offers all the features of a traditional PBX but with the flexibility of the cloud, such as the ability to add new services on the fly. Contrast that with UCaaS, where adding new users can be done in one minute on a website. Adding users could mean having expensive support personnel come out to the company site and require days to get the job done. Since it’s legacy hardware, however, PBX technology is not modified easily or quickly. Many, if not most, companies already have a PBX system that works fine for them. You can’t so much as send an SMS text message over a PBX, much less videoconference.īut it is reliable, mature technology that has been around for decades. Most PBXes are analog, which makes them unable to embrace modern technologies. UC and UCaaS platforms have been gaining ground on PBX (“Private Branch Exchange” or “Public Branch Exchange”) systems, traditional phone systems used to connect office desks together through standard phone lines from a service provider such as AT&T. In addition to providing communication services, UCaaS platforms typically offer integrations with other business applications such as CRM and productivity apps, simplifying workflows. The vendor supplies apps and interfaces that provide a coherent user experience across devices. As with other XaaS products, UCaaS customers pay a monthly or annual subscription fee, and the provider, not the customer, is responsible for maintaining and upgrading the technology infrastructure.Įnd users make use of UCaaS communications from a variety of devices including desk phones, computers, tablets, mobile phones, and meeting room systems. Traditional UC software can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud, but UCaaS technology is always hosted in the cloud by the service provider, with management access provided to the customer via a web interface. UCaaS is the software-as-a-service version of Unified Communications (UC) software, which combines of multiple communication technologies and strategies into a single, comprehensive, and integrated platform.Ĭommunications technologies are typically separated and siloed, but with UC and UCaaS, all of the technologies - telephony (voice calling, voicemail, call forwarding), messaging (one-on-one and group chat), meetings (audio- and videoconferencing), and sometimes other collaboration features such as file sharing and virtual whiteboards - are integrated into one tool.
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