UCCaaS – Solutions for Virtual Working Best Practices

The UCCaaS Partner Accelerator will bring together Cloud providers, app vendors and consultants to address the Unified Communications and Collaboration sector.

The overall market opportunity is defined through a compelling headline theme of ‘Exploring the Future of Work‘.

While virtual, remote working has been an ongoing trend now for many years it was brought sharply to the centre stage and made critically important through the Covid 19 pandemic, when every organization was brute forced to adopt and adapt to these new practices.

Interestingly what this highlighted was despite this long term trend many still found it difficult to adapt to these new practices, with challenges presented both in terms of technology and operations, and also culture. Indeed there has been something of a snapping back to a demand for in-office presence, demonstrating just how ingrained this human instinct is.

Irrespective there is no doubt that there is an ever-present need for both the technologies and expertise to help organizations successfully adopt virtual working practices, meaning a large evergreen market for UCCaaS vendors.

UCCaaS

It may seem like a stuttered typo, it’s typically much more common to refer to UCaaS only – Unified Communications as a Service. The additional C adds Collaboration.

However given this focus on an overall practice of virtual working, which requires both applications as well as telephony options this distinction is important, to truly address the workflow patterns required for virtual team collaboration. Converged Communications explores the differences in this blog, and vendors positioning UCCaaS offerings include Verizon.

For example the key strength of Microsoft is their complete suite of services, where Teams for UC is complemented by Sharepoint for application collaboration.

CCaaS

It’s also to helpful to identify an adjacent product category: CCaaS – Contact Center as a Service.

It used to be that this market was addressed by specialized solutions, ones quite distinct from UC and purpose built for contact centers, typically utilizing proprietary hardware and software.

Now a key facet of the Cloud-based UCCaaS world, is that it’s a capability that can be achieved simply extending the standard products to address this use case. CX Today explores this trend, comparing Google, Zoom and MS Teams and how they are vying for emergent domination of the segment.

However to date it’s still dominated by more established sector specialists, as the Gartner Magic Quadrant defines, listing Genesys, Five9, Cisco, 8×8 and Vonage as the leaders, so the next few years will likely prove highly disruptive for the category, presenting considerable opportunity for more innovative solution offerings and campaigns.