| | June 201719CIOReviewVoice, the Cloud and Snowflakes: A Checklist for Middle Market Companies Thinking about Unified CommunicationsBy Mike Hoyt, SVP-Internet Protocol/Voice Engineering, Windstream [NASDAQ: WIN]If you work for one of the 200,000 mid-sized companies in the U.S., the chances are very good that the office phone on your desk is relying on legacy systems that are 10-20 years old with very few of the features that much larger companies and much smaller companies are taking for granted. Does your voice system link to Salesforce.com and collaborative applications that provide greater productivity and more business intelligence? Do you know exactly what happens to customers when they dial in for support and try to navigate the system? Do you know how many of them successfully reach the department or person they are looking for? Do you know how many of them give up and slam down the phone? Most large enterprise companies have unified communications systems that not only give their employees more features but also have far better performance and provide invaluable business intelligence. The same is true for small businesses, who often have plug-and-play hosted communications solutions from their telecom providers. But why not mid-market companies?Large enterprises are nearly universal users of unified communications for part or all of their operations because telecom providers so often put a focus on those lucrative accounts and have devoted significant resources to assisting these large companies in adopting the cloud and implementing hosted voice solutions in the process. Those big companies have deep pockets, and the simple truth is that they can afford to make aggressive moves to new technology. For small companies, adoption of the cloud and unified communications is widespread not because they have deep pockets, but because these hosted solutions are inexpensive and because they typically have minimal investments in legacy infrastructure. Telecom providers also make it simple for small businesses by providing retail-style bundled packages that allow these businesses to simply flip a switch--figuratively--and get on with their business.Middle market companies have too often been under-served in this area by providers who see the other two segments of the market as more lucrative. That has meant slower adoption of cloud-based voice solutions in the middle-market, but that is poised to change dramatically. In the past few months, prominent analyst firms have released reports that predict a major wave of cloud adoption by the mid-market in the next 6-12 months as companies of this size successfully complete pilot projects and migrate critical applications to the cloud. Essentially, there is a level of experience and trust now with cloud infrastructure that is opening the door for this migration. And the desire from middle market companies to cut costs and simplify IT management provides the motivation to aggressively step through that open door.This wave of cloud adoption in the middle market is about much more than voice, but it is compelling companies to think about voice systems that often have not been updated in 10, 15 or 20 years, leaving the company several generations behind what most large and small companies have. Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solutions allow these companies to make that multi-generational leap in a single, simple step via the cloud, but there are important things they should be looking at and asking about as they move forward:Mike HoytCX INSIGHTS
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