Johannesburg, 17 Mar 2011
Key communications in the cloud trends from a recent study by Interactive Intelligence and Ventana Research indicates a shift from a focus on cost to functionality, and new ways vendors are addressing security concerns.
The traditional drivers for end-users adopting cloud-based communications solutions come down to costs, resources, and risk. But in talking to people more recently, the most commonly cited drivers are flexibility and innovation.
The ability to flexibly scale up and down and quickly add new functionality is huge for end-users. Even more important, they say, is innovation: that is, using hosted communications to change the way their company runs its business and communicates with its customers.
The most important criteria when evaluating a cloud-based communications solution is functionality, functionality and functionality. More important than cost, end-users must find a supplier that has a track record for meeting their unique functionality needs.
While the popularity of cloud-based computing has led to the increasing adoption of hosted communications solutions, customers remain somewhat cautious about security issues.
Customers, especially large enterprises, still have security concerns associated with migrating communications applications to the cloud, however, vendors are offering new ways for mitigating these concerns. For instance, we offer a hosted model that enables customers to keep their voice traffic and recordings inside their network. In addition, our 24/7-monitored data centres are SAS 70-certified and include isolated virtualised servers for each customer.
The adoption of hosted communications to voice over IP, which started in the single digits, has today become the de facto standard. The drivers for VOIP were largely the same as they are today for hosted solutions: reduced costs, fewer resources, and increased innovation. Because of this, I believe that in another seven years the adoption rate for cloud-based communications will reach the 50% to 60% range.
To view the Interactive Intelligence and Ventana Research video interview, visit: http://www.inin.com/ProductSolutions/Pages/Communications-as-a-Service.aspx.
For educational resources about hosted communications solutions, visit: http://www.inin.com/ProductSolutions/Pages/Communications-as-a-Service.aspx.
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