Unified communications

Best Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) Solutions include:

Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Hangouts (Classic).

What are Unified Communications as a Service Solutions?

Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platforms provide a broad range of communication and collaboration applications and services in the cloud. The three main capability areas UCaaS solutions cover are: voice/VoIP, audio and video conferencing, and instant messaging/chat. Many vendors also include team collaboration features, such as screen sharing or real-time document editing. Contact Center software may also be offered as a separate solution or add-on product.

Many vendors in the UCaaS space started out offering one type of communication tool, like Web Conferencing or VoIP software, and then expanded their cloud services to include other types of communication tools. As a result, there is a certain degree of overlap between UCaaS and these two software categories. Certain vendors may be more well known for their web conferencing and voice solutions, even if they also offer fully featured UCaaS platforms.

Other legacy unified communication (UC) vendors have had comprehensive unified communications solutions for a while, but many of these systems started out as on-premise solutions. Now, both vendors also offer unified communications delivered via the cloud.

UCaaS Features & Capabilities

• • • Instant message/chat
    • Presence Technology (makes it possible to locate and identify a computing device)
    • Audio, web, and video conferencing
    • Voice/VoIP technology
    • Team collaboration features (e.g. screen sharing)
    • Business email
    • Call recording
    • Centralized management

Some UCaaS vendors also offer contact-center capabilities, including auto-attendant, interactive voice response, call routing, and customer relationship management integrations. Many vendors are also building APIs into their offerings. This helps customers embed cloud-based communication tools directly into their applications.

UCaaS Trends

Recent trends in this space include:

• • • Increased integration options: Customers have become more demanding about integrations and require better integrations with CRM and other line-of-business applications.
    • Security is becoming a differentiator with some vendors providing packaged encryption and VPN, as well as two-factor authentication and Single Sign-On.
    • User interfaces are becoming more customizable. This enables customers to design the product around their corporate brand.
    • A high degree of consolidation of different types of communication software (e.g. audio/video conferencing, VoIP) into unified cloud platforms.

Pricing Information

Pricing ranges widely depending on the actual bundle of technologies purchased and the number of users.