At Jabra, we’ve been talking about unified communications, or UC as it’s known, for years. With technology advancements and global workplace trends, many organizations are already well into their UC journey, and fully realizing the multitude of benefits.
But for some it’s a new transition. So, let’s discuss what UC is, and how it can improve your productivity in times of flexible working.
What is unified communications?
The major advantage of a unified communications system is that it enables people to work more productively and efficiently by integrating different communications tools. UC software brings together real-time communication technologies like telephony, audio, web or video conferencing and instant messaging into a single interface. This keeps employees, teams and organizations connected and makes it much easier for them to communicate with each other.
Even before Covid-19 sent the whole world home and accelerated UC adoption the world over, Gartner was projecting that enterprise spending on UC would grow from $1.5 billion in 2017, to nearly $3 billion by 2021, while Grand Review Research predicted the UC market would be worth over $167 billion by 2025. So, let’s look at some of the benefits of adopting UC.
UC software brings together real-time communication technologies like telephony, audio, web or video conferencing and instant messaging into a single interface
For starters, let’s talk about productivity. How much time – not to mention knowledge – is lost when you’re still trying to reach people via telephone and then resorting to email? How many delays and bottlenecks happen in that process? UC allows you to reach the right people in your organization, see when they’re available and reduce communication lags by offering real-time options to connect.
Right now, with remote and home working a reality for many, UC facilitates all your collaboration needs. Businesses and teams are experiencing an increased need to innovate and work together on a daily basis to handle the changing times, and gone are the days of relying on in-person meetings to collaborate. So it’s essential to optimize video communications through a UC provider to enable these interactions.
Competitive advantage through effective UC
As important as the need to collaborate, is the need to make quick business decisions. With travel at a standstill, many business-critical decisions that we used to make in person, are now relying on video. UC can facilitate these face-to-face meetings virtually, helping you maintain your competitive advantage in a changing business landscape.
If you haven’t already begun your cloud transformation and UC journey, think about how you are connecting people in your business and whether it could be more efficient. Consolidating your technologies and adopting UC will save your teams time, keep them better connected and able to collaborate, allow you to be more flexible, agile and resilient in the changing business environment of the future.
