Strategy: UC and the Cloud
Building a Strong Base For UC in the Cloud
The cloud computing tornado we’ve all been caught up in hasn’t lost one bit of momentum over the past few months—if anything, additional pressure has been placed on IT to develop a cloud strategy, the sooner the better. However, moving an inefficient business process to the cloud just perpetuates the problem. And, the recent economic climate has meant that the goal of optimizing business processes via technology has often been put on the back burner while organizations focused on reducing operational and capital expenditures.
Some stats: 71% of the of 393 business technology professionals responding to our April InformationWeek Analytics Cloud ROI Survey are either using or considering cloud technologies, with software as a service the top response. For 90% of those using or evaluating cloud, IT is in the thick of the decision-making process, putting to rest the idea that business is primarily driving this bandwagon.
As trends go, cloud is big. But this is not the first time most of us have been around the hype block. It was only a few years ago when the movement to IP-based private branch exchanges promised to let us ride the unified communications wave all the way to efficiency nirvana. Now that cloud services have emerged as the top prospect to reduce IT capex, expedite delivery of new applications, improve business agility and minimize IT support costs, we need to explore the impact these services have on existing technologies.
In this report, we’ll discuss how to prepare for the use of cloud services while extracting the maximum value from what you already own, and from investments you’re preparing to make. To do this, we’ll focus on unified communications; it’s an ideal case study of how to make the most of existing investments while also leveraging the best the cloud has to offer.
Table of Contents
3 Author’s Bio
4 Executive Summary
5 Revisiting the UC Vision
5 Figure 1: Top Unified Communications Technology Driver
6 Cloud Permutations
7 Figure 2: IaaS (Cloud Compute Model)
8 Software Services
8 Figure 3: UC as a Service
9 MSP Vs. Cloud Provider: Cost, Service Tradeoffs
10 Figure 4: SaaS Integration
11 SaaS and Your Investment: 3 Points to Consider
12 SIP Outlook
12 Preparing for the Future
13 Figure 5: Use of Hosted Telephony Services
14 Figure 6: Hybrid Cloud Models
15 Call to Action: 5 Steps to Success
About the Author
With over 12 years of industry experience, John Marchese has focused much of his time developing advanced technology practices and solution architectures. As vice president of sales engineering for BlueWater Communications Group, John leads a team of industry-certified engineers and architects experienced in designing, consulting, building and troubleshooting world-class voice and data networks. In recent years, the building of data center and virtualization practices and their integration with traditional core network infrastructure practices has been a priority for John at BlueWater, and this focus has resulted in the fastest growing area of technology sales within the business.
BlueWater Communications Group was founded in May 2006 to fill a niche overlooked in the market place: the development of emerging technology solutions based on objective business metrics such as return on investment, lower total cost of ownership and increased productivity.
Prior to joining BlueWater, John spent more than six years with Cisco Systems. As a systems engineer in New York, he covered a wide array of vertical enterprise markets including healthcare, media, financial, utilities and legal.
John holds a CCIE certification in routing and switching and a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology.
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