Many organizations focus all of their energy on growing the business but fail to adequately prepare for the challenges that business growth can bring. Growing pains are commonly felt in the areas of communication and collaboration, which become even more important with business expansion.
Will your current infrastructure be able to accommodate additional users and devices? Are your employees able to access critical collaboration features when they are working remotely? Can you add functionality that allows you to improve employee productivity and better serve your customers? How will this infrastructure be maintained and supported as it expands?
Organizations often forget to consider scalability when choosing a phone system. When the business grows, they realize their phone system is incapable of growing with it. They end up repeating their phone system investment and going through a painful “rip and replace” process in a few years instead of building upon their existing system. These kinds of challenges have become even more evident in today’s remote and hybrid work models.
What Does Scalability Mean?
Scalability is one of those words that is casually thrown around as a selling point in the world of IT, especially for unified communications (UC) systems. Generally speaking, a scalable solution is one that can seamlessly expand in terms of the number of users or capabilities. In the specific case of UC, scalability refers to the ability of the UC platform to meet the communications and collaboration needs of users as the organization grows.
Most UC systems are scalable in theory. In reality, however, some platforms have fixed limits. Once you hit that wall, you have to upgrade to a new system if you want to continue to scale.
Organizations often turn to the cloud because they assume that cloud-based Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) is infinitely scalable. That’s possible – in theory. In reality, however, not all cloud service providers can keep up with the needs of a growing organization. They might be able to add more users, but can they maintain a high level of reliability, performance and support with a spike in call volume and system usage?
The Enterprise-Class Advantage
It might seem fast and easy to simply subscribe to an inexpensive business-grade cloud collaboration platform. These solutions are generally quick and easy to implement and provide the basic features that users need today. However, this is likely not the best choice for organizations with more than a few users, those that are growing rapidly, or those that have multiple locations. Also, if you rely upon communication and collaboration tools to serve your customers, you’ll want a solution that’s highly reliable and delivers a high-quality users experience.
The Mitel Mi-Cloud Connect solution is scalable and flexible, allowing organizations to grow and adapt to changing market conditions without compromising communications and collaboration functionality. It delivers industry-leading features and functionality in an intuitive, easy-to-use interface that maximizes the value of your investment. Mi-Cloud Connect provides users with a consistent, high-quality experience on any device, whether they’re working from home, in the office or on the road.
Verteks can help you choose, size, plan, implement and maintain your UC solution. Let us make sure your UC platform is capable of seamlessly and efficiently growing with your organization in terms of both size and functionality.
