Unified communications (UC) platforms have become an essential part of the IT environment. UC gives users access to a range of communication tools in one interface, enabling the collaboration that’s critical to remote and hybrid work.

Traditionally, UC solutions were deployed on premises.

Gartner predicts that by 2028, most organizations will view the cloud as a necessity. That’s due in part to IT modernization efforts and the migration of more business-critical applications. In five years, 70 percent of workloads will be running in the cloud, up from just 25 percent today.

Conventional wisdom says that cloud computing is the ideal IT model for businesses. In practice, the model doesn’t always deliver the expected benefits.

Cloud services enable unprecedented scalability and flexibility while reducing the total cost of ownership of the IT infrastructure.

The contact center traditionally has been undervalued by business leaders, limiting investments in contact center technology. In light of today’s customer demands, however, organizations need to rethink their contact centers in order to enhance the customer experience.

The Software-as-a-Service market (SaaS) market continues to experience rapid growth, with surveys suggesting that almost all organizations now use at least one cloud application. According to the 2023 State of SaaSOps Report from BetterCloud, organizations use an average of 130 SaaS applications.

People are a company’s biggest expense. Wages, benefits, payroll taxes, training and equipment expenditures account for as much as 70 percent of total business costs. However, successful businesses understand that employees are also their most valuable asset.

Edge computing has been around for the better part of three decades, but it only entered the mainstream technology conversation a few years ago when it became a key enabler of Internet of Things (IoT) projects. While it remains essential for facilitating IoT initiatives, the edge model now has far more broad appeal with important use cases in practically every industry vertical.

In an increasingly digitized world, milliseconds matter. Almost imperceptible network communications delays can have negative consequences on a growing array of latency-sensitive applications, including voice, video, artificial intelligence, analytics and more.

It is beyond debate that IT modernization efforts require a well-defined cloud computing strategy. In a recent survey, more than 95 percent of IT leaders said they are aggressively pursuing plans to leverage public, private and hybrid clouds to help meet the future IT needs of their organizations.

As we discussed in our last post, cooperative procurement contacts help government agencies, educational institutions and some nonprofit organizations save time and money on technology acquisitions by aggregating purchasing power. Analysts say state and local governments save more than $300 billion of taxpayer dollars each year through increased purchasing efficiencies.