As a member of the Small-to-medium business (SMB) sector, you can benefit greatly from Unified Communications (UC), as it allows you to cost effectively utilize comprehensive solutions previously only affordable to large enterprises. Smaller staff and fewer finances don’t have to inhibit your communications capabilities and being a growing organization shouldn’t stop you from gaining a competitive edge. UC can help you do this while containing costs and simultaneously furthering your ability to execute and innovate.
Today’s UC offerings are continuously improving in order to enhance the business value of unified communications for SMBs. As a small-to-medium business, your implementation of UC differs greatly from that of a larger organization. With high priorities placed on an immediate payoff to your business and communication simplicity, SMBs should look for a provider who supplies enhanced platforms designed to deliver all UC applications from a single-server solution to shave cost and simplify deployment and management. Here are a few things to keep in mind to determine if a UC provider is catering to your SMB needs:
1. Mobility facilitates better employee communications while enhancing and improving productivity no matter where work takes them. As SMBs become progressively more mobile, look for UC providers to cater to your need for voice and data support. Many UC providers are designing and, more importantly, pricing, mobile solutions to meet these criteria.
2. Standards-based software solutions allow use of industry standards servers and reduces capital expense. With these solutions, you have the option of utilizing multiple devices, which benefits smaller businesses by allowing them to easily implement various forms of communications for different workers within the organization. Imagine the ease of communication with your choice of voice and video collaboration for geographically dispersed teams as well as softphones for your remote workers.
3. Video & web collaboration can add a whole new, affordable dimension to your business communication. What’s more is it provides smaller organizations with a cost-effective, premises-based tool to simplify internal information sharing among employees with the added benefit of easy information distribution with partners, suppliers and customers as well. In a recent report,IDC noted the importance of SMBs controlling costs and reported that 45% currently use conferencing technology.
Click here to learn what steps NEC has taken to accommodate the growing business needs of the SMB market.
