UCaaS vs. on-premise UC. Everybody wins with Imagicle.

UC world: everybody is clouding.

Working for a company that develops UC applications, every day I hear people talking about the cloud. Actually, everybody talks about “The Cloud.” It can be my colleague as well as my taxi driver, even if I’m not sure both refer to the same clouds I’m going to talk about hereunder… 🙂

Jokes apart, the plain fact is that in the last years the cloud offer is experiencing rapid adoption, while On-Premise one is clearly decreasing. In fact, according to a Gartner research I read a few days ago, we’ll reach the crossover point in 2021.

As you can see in this figure, the cloud seems to dominate IT market, being the standard for storage, computing, and many productivity apps.

In the same way, the number of UC-as-a-service (UCaaS) offerings has exploded as more and more businesses are turning to the cloud as a way of delivering communication services.

In 2021 the Unified Communications as a service (UCaaS) market will be worth more than 23 billion dollars with a 4-year CAGR of 17%.

UCaaS and On-Prem: a matter of people.

Does this make UCaaS the winner of this challenge? Not exactly.

The two are not black and white; it is not a rigid dichotomy. Despite UCaaS’s rising fortunes, on-prem solutions are not dead and won’t be for a very long time.

In my opinion, the final decision really rests in the hands of the companies and depends on multiple factors.

For instance, if you’re looking for customization of features, a UCaaS offer will hardly fit your needs. Conversely, if you need to scale vertically for a greater number of users, or horizontally to add different applications, UCaaS options seems to be preferred way.

But are we sure it’s all a matter of technology? Well, for IT Manager it may be so, but do you think that a telephone operator or a generic manager is interested in Cloud vs On-Premise debate? Or they’ll be rather interested in the way the daily tools can change their working life?

Thus, what appears to be a technology issue becomes a matter of getting the job done.

People don’t want a Cloud or On-Prem architecture: they want to communicate and collaborate in the simplest way possible.

Think of your Webex Teams. It represents the front end of the whole Cisco collaboration architecture and, often, it’s the only thing on which you form your judgment of your communication system. Little relevance whether it’s on Prem or on the Cloud.

What I mean is that the thing you love is what actually allows you to write and speak, your Webex Teams; not the amazing Cisco infrastructure that lies under it.

You’re just remotely aware of that.

Imagicle solutions. How we make it concrete.

In other words, applications are the enablers of the real value of any collaboration architecture and they determine its adoption.

Let me give 3 examples based on my experience.

• • The first one regards TIM, the leading Italian Service Provider that offers a complete UCaaS solution based on Cisco HCS to SMB and Enterprises. Imagicle apps run on the TIM datacenters, which are included in the offer but not mandatory.Guess what? More than 9 out of 10 customers have chosen Imagicle apps as they provide a feature-rich UC experience with all the stuff they want to have also going for Cloud.
  • Another significant case concerns the European leader in the distribution of packaging products: Rajapack. In this case, Imagicle Customer Service applications have been crucial to choosing the Cisco BE6000, as helped Rajapack in both adding new features and getting rid of the disruptions caused by the previous system. Once again, the applications made the difference, and today “up to 100 calls missed in a day are just a bad memory”.
  • The last example is about a Hotel Chain market leader in the Nordics with over 30.000 rooms. By adopting Imagicle apps, it created a Private Cloud architecture composed of two Cisco Unified Communications Manager clusters integrated with Oracle Hospitality Opera PMS in multi-tenant mode, able to provide to the 180 hotels of four countries, all the needed hospitality features.

Change your perspective.

It’s true, it’s a changing scenario and It can be confusing.

So, here is what you can do: move from talking about UCaaS vs On-Prem to figuring out how people want to communicate and collaborate.

Whatever is the architecture chosen, Cisco offers best of breed collaboration platforms, and Imagicle is always ready to complete and empower them with must-have apps.

Together, with system integrators and Sevice Providers, we can help any customer to improve the way they run their communications and get their job done.

#stayimagicle