For many businesses, especially large enterprises, contact centers are a key contributor to revenue and customer satisfaction. While “omni-channel” (voice, chat, email, social) is how many if not most contact centers operate, calls are the still the most critical element of their communications. Research from market research firm Metrigy confirms this, with 64% of consumers indicating that voice/phone is a vital customer interaction channel, particularly as it relates to customer service inquiries.[i]

When Voice over IP (VoIP) emerged 20 years ago, businesses’ voice and IT teams were skeptical about how wise – and safe – it was to move voice calls over the Internet via data packets. Although VoIP was substantially more cost-effective, there were concerns around audio quality, latency and, of course, security.

Today, securing VoIP sessions and applications has become a huge challenge. With a growing number of calls and collaborative sessions using VoIP on public and private networks, service providers must respond to enterprises’ increasing concerns about security.

Wondering what your options are when one of your traditional communications vendors suggests you rip out your legacy Nortel infrastructure so you can replace one proprietary platform with another? Why spend more money to be vendor-locked, have to retrain your team, and disrupt your end-users lives with a new expensive plastic phone that they didn’t request?

Business today gets done online, and the digital transformation of large enterprises is driving nearly every single transaction to the cloud, the web, mobile apps, and more.

The virtualization of these digital enterprises is creating substantial gains in employee productivity, with an unprecedented number of them “dialing in” from remote locations, and a parallel growth in the number of on-site workers in offices, hospitals and medical clinics, in classrooms, public venues and more staying connected using business workflow apps as companions.

It’s no secret we are in the middle of a mobile revolution. There’s a mobile app we can download to our smartphones designed to make just about any activity in our modern lives more convenient, more productive or more organized. Or more connected to our friends, family, colleagues … and the world in general!

Have we moved on from the idea of “Unified Communications” to “Optimized Real-Time Communications?” There’s a lot of chatter going on about the death of “UC” and the rise of “RTC” for businesses, and the notion that the desktop phone and PBX as we knew them are being systematically, if slowly, decommissioned in favor of the more sophisticated mobile devices now available. But it’s not just the devices, it’s the applications including security applications, and the movement toward embedding RTC into everyday workflow and platforms, including CRM.

Enterprise communications continues to be one of the most important and mission-critical areas in most organizations today.  Providing global workforces with the latest in communications technologies is at the top of the priority list for most CIOs and IT leaders. 

Every couple of decades or so, the telecommunications industry goes through a technology transition – analog to digital, for example – that profoundly impacts the way services are created and delivered, as well as the business models behind them. The ongoing and steady distillation of communications functions and features into pure software, which can be executed on generic and elastic hardware resources, is one of those industry-altering transitions.

In just a few short years, the communications industry has been turned on its head. While traditional telecom operators often defined the manner in which subscribers would communicate – voice or SMS, for the most part – end users are now much more influential in calling the shots.

Despite the widespread use in the past decade of IP-based communications systems known as IP PBXs, the TDM pipes that connect those enterprise platforms to the public network have only slowly been replaced by IP connections. For multiple reasons, the most prominent being the desire of some network operators to preserve a fairly hefty cash cow of TDM T1s, E1s and PRIs, this IP-based connectivity service – commonly referred to as SIP Trunking – is only now hitting its groove.