What is UCaaS? 6 Channels of UCaaS

What is UCaaS?

In today’s world “Everything-as-a-Service” economy has expanded massively, with rapid consumerism and globalization. UCaaS is one of the widely-known terms in this economy. In this blog post, we will try to answer the question of what is UCaaS. Time to get down to details.

UCaaS is an enterprise service method for streamlining all communication platforms. First and foremost, we must explain what the acronym stands for. UCaaS stands for Unified Communications-as-a-Service, also known as Unified Cloud Communications. In fact, it is an interconnected system of enterprise communication devices and applications that can be used in concert or successively.

Channels of UCaaS

After answering the question of what is UCaaS, now we can talk about the channels used in this concept. Users can navigate through different communication channels in a way that is seamlessly integrated. These various types of communication processes and services may include:

Voice Telephony

This channel of UCaaS includes fixed, mobile and softphone enterprise telephony, as well as standard PBX functionality.

Collaboration Solutions

This includes multi-party voice (audio) conferencing, video conferencing and web conferencing capabilities such as screen sharing.

Messaging

This channel of UCaaS includes voicemail and unified messaging for instance, voicemails, texts as well as faxes being sent to an email application.

Instant Messaging (IM) & Presence Information

Instant messaging allows users to send text and other information to other users in real time. Presence information quickly provides the status of other people and resources.

Mobility/Unified Clients:

UCaaS enables access to multiple communication functions from a consistent interface on multiple platforms. These may include desk phones, thick desktop clients, browser clients, and clients for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

Communications-Enabled Processes:

This refers to the ability to integrate the UCaaS solution with other broader work and business applications, such as CRM solutions and contact center software.

Types of UCaaS Architectures

Businesses have the option to choose from two models or architectures while accessing UCaaS. Now let’s explain what these are.

Single-Tenancy Model

The first architecture model is a single-tenancy model. In other words, a single-tenant has personalized software with shared hardware. This model is best for data security because all access permissions and customizations are done by the company end. If you want to read more about single-tenancy model you can check our other blog posts.

Multi-Tenancy Model

Another architecture in UCaaS is multi-tenancy model. In this model, multiple clients can share both the software and the hardware elements of the service. Here, each client may have the option to customize certain parts of the application, for instance, the color used in the user interface or business rules that are being applied, but they can not change the application code or the functions of the software.

If you want to read more about multi-tenancy model you can check our other blog posts.

Benefits of UCaaS

We can safely say that there are many advantages of using UCaaS. Let’s talk about some of the benefits of UCaaS for any organization.

Lower Costs

The greatest advantage of uCaaS is that, it runs on a subscription-based model. UCaaS solutions are delivered via the cloud, therefore as a business you don’t need to worry or invest time in the maintenance of the software or the hardware. Therefore, switching to UCaaS from older communications equipment can provide tremendous cost savings to be enjoyed.

Advanced Features

Another huge advantage of unified communications technology is that it provides advanced functionality that isn’t offered in other types of communication technologies. UCaaS enables users to interact through new channels, and enhance communication in innovative ways. You can, for instance, easily switch from voice to video. Moreover, instead of a simple voice call, you can collaborate via a video conference and share screens or documents. During a video conference, users can also communicate through other channels such as instant messaging, improving the experience of the conference call.

Flexible Communications

In a UCaaS platform, you are able to choose between multiple communications methods, such as voice, video, e-mail, social and text. You can use different types of features that exist within these channels. This flexibility is very important, as it gives users the ability to communicate in the ways they prefer and to reach out to customers using the methods that those customers prefer.

Disaster Recovery

In communication services that are cloud-based, there is often a built-in business continuity plan and automated failover system. Maintaining multiple platforms in separate locations may sound like a daunting task, but this shouldn’t be a problem of yours because in UCaaS, if a data center becomes unavailable, a backup takes over immediately and this process can prevent business interruption from a natural disaster. In case the business location is impacted, calls can be rerouted to another location or mobile devices.