Implementing a digital strategy

Implementing a digital strategy to connect your team and provide great, usable tools for communications is complex.  There are many tools out there that provide a platform to connect your team, but what are the essentials?

The Gartner group provides some great insight into the core capabilities of a Unified Communications solution:

  • Telephony
  • Meeting solutions
  • Instant messaging and presence
  • Clients across desktop, conference room, and mobile devices
  • Integration options with contact center and other applications

In this year’s research, we have made the following changes to three of the critical capabilities included:

  • Interoperability/Integration: To better reflect application leaders’ interest in acquiring new contact center solutions when they are replacing an existing PBX with a new UC suite, this capability now includes increased focus on the ability for the base UC system to integrate with the vendor’s own native or partner’s contact center infrastructure.
  • Workstream Collaboration: With workstream collaboration gaining traction, and often cited as the main driver of innovation on vendor roadmaps, this capability carries more influence on buyer’s decisions.
  • Meeting Solutions: Last year’s “Conferencing” critical capability has been renamed “Meeting Solutions” to better reflect the broader set of capabilities available in the market. Enterprise users in today’s digital workplaces — tired of traditionally “siloed” audio, video, and web-conferencing applications — are looking for converged online meeting solutions that deliver easy-to-use, seamless multimedia experiences in concert with content sharing, team collaboration tools, and automated coordination processes.

– from Gartner (Critical Capabilities for Unified Communications )

If you’re responsible for finding a solution to transform and digitize your workplace you need to find a solution that brings solid value, measurable improvements, and a user experience your team will onboard quickly. 

Some of the key findings from the Gartner report provide a great roadmap for features you want in an Enterprise Unified Communications solution;

Key Findings

  • Due to the changing nature of work, application leaders are looking for unified communications (UC) solutions that support their employees’ need to collaborate from anywhere, at any time, and from any device.
  • On-premises UC solutions have reached a high degree of maturity. Most of the innovation seen over the past year is due to integration with cloud-based workstream collaboration services using a hybrid deployment model.
  • Businesses migrating away from legacy PBX systems are typically looking for broader UC suites that include essential voice, messaging, video, and meeting solutions, as well as integration into contact center solutions, all from a single vendor.
  • Larger enterprises with stringent voice and video requirements typically prefer traditional on-premises UC solutions due to a greater sense of control over quality and performance.
  • Small and midsize companies are finding that cloud-based UC services are increasingly competitive with current on-premises solutions.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for an affordable, well-designed. Cloud-based solution, explore the CounterPath Unified Communications solution.  

To read more about the insights, key findings and recommendations from the Gartner group you can read more about their research here: https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-46Z6VUW&ct=170720&st=sb