“This is not a matter of switching from a legacy PBX to another kind of PBX,” said Dave Dyson, CEO of Eclipse Telecom, a Chicago-based business management consultant. “We did that when we went from traditional copper-based PBXs to VoIP, and I think a lot of folks are looking at this in the same way. But the reality is that you have to think about unified communications differently. This platform This is something Trusted Advisors must educate their customers about: With UCaaS, they are en- hancing productivity, communications, and the customer experience, he said. “While you’re removing friction from the customer experience, you’re also adding efficiency to your company because your systems are more capable of getting customers to the right people within your organization to sell them the thing they want to buy, or to solve the customer service issue that they have,” Dyson continued. “So, the customer doesn’t need to get transferred around the company hoping to find the person who can help them. This anticipatory behavior drives revenue, increased customer satisfaction, and higher Net Promoter scores.” There was a time when many people were uncertain about using the cloud to fully support their busi- ness communications, but those perceptions have dramatically changed over the last few years and continue to change even more rapidly amidst a global pandemic. Moving forward we expect UCaaS to expand into new frontiers such as voice/natural language processing (NLP) and speech recognition, which will open the door to new differentiators, especially for those who own their own platforms or APIs, thereby making their offerings more difficult to copy, and speeding time-to-market. “When you update your platform, you’re raising the stakes of what your business can do,” said Jim Mc- Garry, Regional Vice President of Channel Sales at Mitel. “This isn’t just about dial-tone. This is about collaboration, about the empowerment of your mobile users and, most importantly, this is about changing the way your customers connect with you. This is your brand-building.” Indeed, avoiding the cloud is perilous to an organiza- “Any way you look at tion’s success, cautioned added Jamaal Savwoir, Direc- tor of Channel Sales Engineering at 8x8, a cloud service it, PBX technology has provider based in Campbell, Calif., citing recent reports probably seen its final and ongoing technological advances in the hosted days.” world. “PBXs have had their day,” Savwoir said. “For quite a while there was a significant amount of risk associated with moving to the cloud, but industry analysts are now saying that the actual risk is not moving to the cloud fast enough. Innovation is no longer happening in premises-based systems. They continue to go end-of-life, end of sale, out of maintenance – not to mention the fact that people who have traditionally maintained or used those systems are quickly moving on to other phases of their careers. Any way you look at it, PBX technology has probably seen its final days.” While Savwoir’s point of view is widely held in the IT industry, not everyone is quite ready to put the proverbial fork into the legacy PBX business. 14 Copyright © 2020 AVANT Communications, Inc.