How to choose an SMB Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solution

Your guide to choosing the best Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solution for your small or medium business

Johnson said the delivery mechanism for these services does create issues for telecommunications providers. In Asia, Microsoft promotes its advantages in delivering from a single large data centre.

It partners with dominant telco’s and channel partners in each country of operation. It’s Singapore UCaaS capacity is dimensioned for a minimum 500,000 users.

“This obliges all but the largest telecommunications providers to avoid launching competitive products because of this effectively high barrier to entry,” Johnson said.

“Users that require certainty of data hosting within their geographic jurisdiction will have a major issue in evaluating Office 365 while it is hosted from Singapore. Government agencies in any country are unlikely to sanction the hosting of sensitive data, including email or messaging, offshore.”

What about the UCaaS value proposition?

Many enterprise users complain about the cost of UC licenses when they need to multiply the unit-licensed seat cost by a large number (typically more than 250 users).

While UCaaS services appear to be significantly less expensive than internally provided UC, Johnson said that advantage can diminish significantly for full support packages.

Early adopters are favouring the use of a single-vendor solution rather than best of breed, he said.

Despite the Cloud nature of Office 365 users will pay different prices for it depending on where they are located. On Microsoft’s US web site a small business package is listed as $6 per user per month in Singapore, $7.90 in Australia and $7.20 in New Zealand.

“Exchange rates, customs duties and local taxes do not change this picture much. Network latency means most users will not want to operate their Asia Pacific UCaaS from US data centres,” Johnson said.

Hosted solution providers are operating with very low margins so pricing is competitive but users should evaluate whether they prefer operating expenditure (opex) rather than capital expenditure (capex) in their sourcing.

UCaaS Shopping Checklist

Gartner advises organisations to ensure pricing options and offshore hosting/privacy issues are adequately addressed for their business context.

Plus there is the usual raft of cloud Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery issues which apply to UCaaS. They include security, reliability, latency, performance, support, and consistency across geographies.

If adopting a Microsoft UCaaS Gartner advises doing it progressively starting with IM, email, voice, video or Web conferencing and finally, telephony. However, for vendor UC solutions begin with telephony.

Finally, the role for UCaaS as a hybrid on-premises/cloud solution or directly from public or private clouds should be considered for each communication component (mobile, fixed voice, messaging and conferencing) as well as popular UCC suites.

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Tags unified communicationsUnified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)

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