UCAAS Blog

Can Technology Leaders RingCentral, 8x8, and Mitel Meet The Challenge?

RingCentral, Mitel, and 8x8 are all heavyweight providers of UCaaS and contact center solutions. RingCentral made early 2019 headlines with its acquisition of contact center provider Connect First. Mitel is also on a roll, recently announcing 23% year-over-year growth in recurring clouds seats. And 8x8 just received the coveted TechTarget award for Cloud Communications solutions. But can these three technology leaders meet the many business challenges facing companies in the Financial Services industry?

Can Technology Leaders RingCentral, 8x8, and Mitel Meet The Challenge?

RingCentral, Mitel, and 8x8 are all heavyweight providers of UCaaS and contact center solutions. RingCentral made early 2019 headlines with its acquisition of contact center provider Connect First. Mitel is also on a roll, recently announcing 23% year-over-year growth in recurring clouds seats. And 8x8 just received the coveted TechTarget award for Cloud Communications solutions. But can these three technology leaders meet the many business challenges facing companies in the Financial Services industry?

How do UCaaS Providers RingCentral, 8x8, and Jive stack up for retail customers?

RingCentral and 8X8 are both designated as ‘Leaders’ in the Gartner Group’s 2018 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), and both offer cost-effective voice solutions and proven collaboration solutions. Their competitor Jive is getting a lot of attention since its acquisition by LogMeIn in 2018. So how to retail organizations juggling cost-containment, building omnichannel capabilities, and transforming the customer experience choose a UCaaS solution?

Step 9 - Support & Innovation

This blog series has just about run its natural course. I have talked about my experiences and thoughts regarding best practices for the UCaaS or CCaaS Projects that many organizations undertake or are thinking about undertaking in the future as they update their business-critical systems and infrastructure.  

Step 8 - Hand-off to Support

My blog series has now led us to this point: our project has gone live and is performing as expected. At this point, someone usually raises the question of transitioning the project to support. 

Find all 9 steps of UCaaS project HERE

Step 7 - Installment

In my previous blog posts about UCaaS project topics, we covered all the required steps to plan, provision, deliver, test and train. This installment will cover the all-important go-live step. This is when we prove that all the work has been done correctly as we take the solution live in the production environment. In theory, this should be a routine event with no drama or unexpected outcomes. We say that because of the preparation and testing that gave you the confidence to go-live in the first place.

Find all 9 steps of UCaaS project HERE

Digital transformation doesn't happen overnight

When Mitel acquired ShoreTel in 2017, they inherited not only a great premise solution but also a market-leading true multi-instance cloud solution. These solutions also shared a software platform, which made them unique in the market as they were the only solutions to allow customers to run a hybrid cloud solution with the same user experience. Additionally, Mitel had to take on board over 35,000 ShoreTel Premise customers and over 600 ShoreTel partners who provide technical support for those customers.

Step 6 - Training

We can probably all look back on a project we were involved in either as a customer or a provider that was well defined, built exactly to the requirements, thoroughly tested, and still had a rocky go-live period. What went wrong? The most likely suspect is a poorly thought out or executed training plan.

Find all 9 steps of UCaaS project HERE

Step 5 - Testing

In our blog series, there has been a lot of emphasis on attention to detail and setting up a project that is steeped in “tried and true” project management fundamentals. We are now at the point where we have worked with the customer to ensure that we captured their requirements to the best of our ability. We’ve designed and developed a solution with the customer’s approval. Finally, we’ve had our implementation team provision and deliver that design to specifications. Now comes the final piece – testing – to ensure that what we provisioned and delivered functions to the manufacturer’s specifications.

Find all 9 steps of UCaaS project HERE

Healthcare Struggles To Protect Health Data 

5,579,438 patient records were breached in 2017, according to new data released on 23 of January 2018 in the Protenus Breach Barometer Report. Insider threats can remain undiscoverable for long periods of time. The Report states that "on average, it took 308 days for an organization to discover it had suffered a breach in 2017."