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.

As organizations of all sizes continue to move more data and workloads to the cloud, most are facing significant new security challenges. Ninety-eight percent of companies surveyed recently by IDC said they experienced at least one cloud data breach within the previous 18 months, with 67 percent reporting three or more such incidents.

The ability to deliver advanced communication and collaboration services to increasingly distributed workforces is driving rapid growth of cloud-delivered unified communications solutions. Analysts with Metrigy predict that 70 percent of businesses will be using UC-as-a-Service within two years.

Lacking a coherent collaboration strategy, many organizations adopt multiple collaboration solutions from multiple vendors, and don’t have much of a grasp on how much it all costs. The subscription and license fees are only the tip of the iceberg. Network and IT support costs and a poor user experience add to the TCO of collaboration.