If you’re looking to upgrade your phone system and weighing the differences between on-premise and approaches hosted in the cloud, consider these factors to get the solution that best meets your needs:

When thinking about either VoIP or Unified Communications, these two terms crop up pretty often. They are often used interchangeably, and that can get in the way for making good decisions about these technologies. You may not give this much thought, but the distinctions are important, especially if the vendor is doing most of the talking. To help prepare you for that, I’ll address them here.

The Value of Communicating
At face value, this is a rather generic term, and probably describes how we spend most of our time at work. One way or another, we need to communicate to get things done, either in one-to-one settings or with groups. Increasingly, communication takes place in real-time or near real-time, thanks largely to the Internet, but also mobility. These technologies make it much easier to get in touch, which also means we do a lot more communicating.

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Mitel, a global provider in business communications, announced Tuesday the availability of MiCloud Enterprise Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) for the UK market. Channel partners can now offer organizations a fully-featured solution via the cloud, enabling their customers to improve communication and reduce capital expenditures.

MiCloud Enterprise UCaaS will allow channel partners to tap into the rapid growth of the UCaaS market. A recent MarketsandMarket report indicates that 2014 marks the start of the technology’s widespread adoption and, by 2018, revenue is expected to more than double to $7.62 billion.

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To better understand the drivers of a market, one great strategy is to follow who’s doing all the buying. With businesses becoming increasingly mobile, it’s an easy guess that mobility-related spending will increase. Some estimates have that spending pushing the total market spend as high as $71 billion, with small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) spending the bulk of those dollars.

In a recent AMI Partners study, businesses that have fewer than 100 employees will account for 80 percent of the mobility spending; businesses that have 100–999 employees will make up the other 20 percent. Small businesses that have fewer than 100 employees are a lot more difficult to target and have a much larger mix of products they desire. There are fewer midsized businesses in the 100–999 category, and each of those firms spends bigger dollars than the average small business. As a result, it’s easier to understand their spending and growing business needs.

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