Why enterprise adoption of cloud UC should accelerate in 2019

Enterprise cloud UC provides consistent, hassle-free telephony

Like many enterprises, PTC had accumulated telephony hardware from several vendors over the years, and its IT staff was struggling to manage contracts with dozens of service providers and management companies around the world.

The company viewed cloud UC as a solution to that problem and began piloting UCaaS in 2016 as part of a broader effort to move storage, development and other technologies to the cloud.

"What we found out through our journey with Fuze and through the exploratory period was that Fuze becomes the one vendor," Mahoney said. "They are your service provider; they are your carrier; they are your hardware manufacturer."

The switch boosted business for PTC, too. Fuze was able to provide sales teams with local numbers in each country that they wanted to target, regardless of where the sales teams were based. As a result, more potential customers began picking up the phone because they recognized a local number, Mahoney said.

For Pacific Dental Services, moving UC to the cloud was about addressing the poor quality of service and frequent maintenance issues of its on-premises telephony. The company wanted to free IT staff to work on other operational matters.

"You can invest millions and millions of dollars on great on-prem installs, and then you need a bunch of really skilled engineers to run that stuff," Baker said. "And I wanted to keep it as simple as possible and get out of the operational support on this type of system."

Regulatory, feature hurdles remain for enterprise cloud UC

Despite the increased adoption of UCaaS by enterprises in 2018, small and midsize businesses still account for 90% of the more than 8 million UCaaS seats worldwide, according to Synergy.

Many large businesses may still have reservations about cloud telephony.

Enterprises in some verticals have regulatory requirements that require them to retain control over UC traffic within their data centers. Others may need complex integrations between UC and other business apps that the one-size-fits-all model of UCaaS can't yet support.

"Microsoft is pretty famous for changing their APIs and interfaces, and [integrations] break all the time when that forced upgrade occurs," said Dave Stein, principal at Stein Technology Consulting Group.

In some cases, UCaaS may not support the advanced calling features every enterprise needs. Many users of the on-premises version of Microsoft Skype for Business have resisted moving to cloud-based Microsoft Teams for that reason.

"I have seen situations where there were issues with features that were not there, and maybe an assumption was made that it was," said Melissa Swartz, founder of Swartz Consulting LLC. "But I see that less and less."

Synergy expects the use of UCaaS to increase rapidly in the coming years. UCaaS adoption has still only penetrated 10% of the total PBX market.