Unified Communications as a Service

Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) is a category of “as a Service” or “Cloud” delivery mechanisms for Enterprise Communications. Similar to “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) (where data center capacity is made available to an enterprise on a consumption model from a service provider), with UCaaS, unified communications services can be made available from the cloud to enterprises. UCaaS is part of the global industry trend towards cloud services.

UCaaS first came to prominence 2014, on the heels of the cloud IT movement.

Traditionally, enterprises have acquired and deployed their own communications infrastructure. This was by far the most economical approach, as enterprises could deploy their own PBX switches and avoid the cost of individual phone lines for each employee. With the advent of IP and virtualization of the data center, the economics have shifted back in favour of a service provider model. The SP invests in a virtualized data centre, negating the need for the enterprise to do so, and offers a more flexible consumption model.

Prior to the Cloud, service providers offered IP Centrex and Hosted communications services. These were almost identical to the UCaaS capability, except for the fact that “virtualization” has meant that the economics of UCaaS is so much more compelling.

The primary rationale for UCaaS is the fact that it allows a company to shift from a capital investment to an operating cost model. In addition, it provides companies with the ability to more rapidly increase their consumption (i.e. consume more licenses), or decrease their consumption, without the need for capital. With a traditional communications model, companies must acquire capacity ahead of demand and they rarely get it totally correct, which means over-capacity.

Secondly, the growing sophistication of enterprise unified communications has meant that companies must invest not only capital. They must invest more and more in their IT staff in order to be able to support this growing sophistication. Adding new features and upgrades are non-trivial and while communications are critical to the success of the business and productivity of its staff, the maintenance of the infrastructure requires a high level of expertise that continues to grow. Companies are able to off-load most of this complexity to service providers with a UCaaS model, as well as ensuring that they always have the very latest versions and features.

Historically, enterprise and government organizations needed to keep their carriage provider (i.e. access to the PSTN) in a highly competitive position. If they allowed the SP to lock them in with a Centrex solution, then they may not able to achieve the best carriage rates. Now, with carriage becoming a commodity and UC license becoming a premium, there is much less risk to moving to a SP UCaaS solution.

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Wikipedia