At Mitel, we’re fortunate to work with an incredible partner community full of deep, diverse expertise. So, each month, we’re going to share some of that expertise by highlighting partner blog posts about the business communications topics relevant to modern IT pros.
Cloud-based UC gains traction By Allstream
The forecast is looking pretty sunny for cloud-based unified communications (UC). Transparency Market Research predicts the value of the global UC-as-a-Service (UCaaS) market will grow from US$5.6 billion in 2013 to US$37.8 billion by 2022. (In case anyone’s wondering, that’s a wow-worthy compound annual growth rate of 23.4 per cent.) Cloud UC is gaining traction with businesses big and small, according to Ovum’s 2017 UC Trends Study. SMEs see it as a way to devote less IT resources to communications applications, Ovum says, while larger enterprises view it as a way to replace complex multivendor PBX networks and move communications spending from capex to opex.
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Today’s mobile customer is more intelligent and more social than ever before. They tend to spend more time on social media, and share personal details about themselves. But they also have higher expectations. There’s a lot of pressure on having a great experience each time customers interact with your brand, whether you are a mobile phone company, a utility company or a retailer. Businesses are responding by prioritizing the customer experience as a competitive differentiator. According to Forrester, 89 percent of businesses are planning to compete mainly on customer experience.1
Need more information on how to have an exceptional customer experience? Download Customer Experience For Dummies now. > What does it take to stay competitive in this kind of environment? In the past, contact centers and web teams have been operated and staffed separately. With the digital transformation of customer experience, however, we now see these two functions merging. Your business needs to consider t..

Troubleshooting problems is among the IT community’s top problems when managing voice network performance. According to a recent survey, 90% of the time it takes to resolve network problems is spent finding its source. Without the right voice network performance management tools at your fingertips, you’ll be spinning your wheels. To help you tackle your voice network problems, we’ve put together a list of four troubleshooting tips, tried and true from managing the performance of more than 10,000 devices around the globe.
Tip #1: Detect Call Quality Problems at an Early Stage The earlier a problem is detected, the less impact it will have on users. It will also cause less panic and be resolved faster. The key here is a monitoring system that uses thresholds to drive performance alarms. Thresholds for voice quality, for example can be set to generate warning alarms for potential or impending problems, before any significant effects have been felt. Problems that are less critical for you..

Digital transformation — the rapid evolution of technology used to connect people, things and information — has been a trend in business for years now. This means that upon graduating, many high school students will enter a workforce where employees often spend more than six hours a day using digital tools to communicate[1].
And, in order to prepare students to thrive in these digital environments, elementary schools through high schools are starting to undergo their own digital transformation, passing on benefits to administrators, staffers and parents as well. Amid this transformation, schools have a number of considerations of how digital transformation is altering the educational experience. Here we look at the top 12 education technology trends your school should prepare for.
1. Parents are interacting more and more with teachers and administrators. Parents often have meetings several nights a week with teachers and administrators, and from parent-teacher conferences to back-to-..

While good communications between staff and customers matter to all businesses, for the hospitality industry the stakes are even higher. Online ratings and reviews can dramatically affect your hotel’s bottom line, and how you handle your guest experience will dictate whether and how well your guests review your hotel. Here are a few key hospitality-specific communications challenges that can make or break your guest experience, and a few ways to solve them with the right hospitality technology.
Challenge #1: Limited resources, particularly at night The hospitality industry is a 24/7 business, but at night hotels typically have reduced staff numbers. On-duty staff are left multi-tasking, and can miss crucial communications while away from the front desk tending to other matters.
The solution: Automation and effective mobile technology. When your staff numbers are down, it’s important to take advantage of hotel technology that can automate responses to certain types of calls. Features ..

While good communications between staff and customers matter to all businesses, for the hospitality industry the stakes are even higher. Online ratings and reviews can dramatically affect your hotel’s bottom line, and how you handle your guest experience will dictate whether and how well your guests review your hotel. Here are a few key hospitality-specific communications challenges that can make or break your guest experience, and a few ways to solve them with the right hospitality technology.
Challenge #1: Limited resources, particularly at night The hospitality industry is a 24/7 business, but at night hotels typically have reduced staff numbers. On-duty staff are left multi-tasking, and can miss crucial communications while away from the front desk tending to other matters.
The solution: Automation and effective mobile technology. When your staff numbers are down, it’s important to take advantage of hotel technology that can automate responses to certain types of calls. Features ..

Writing a request for proposal (RFP) can be time-consuming, and it can be difficult to know how much to include. While there are plenty of RFP templates available online, it’s not always clear what part of the RFP actually helps your organization achieve its long-term goals.
To help you answer this question, here are eleven tips for getting the best bid out of your RFP.
Be selective It’s not worth your time to sift through a proposal from a vendor who doesn’t have the technical capacity to fulfill your needs. Likewise, you should only send an RFP to a vendor you know will be around to support you. Once you’ve identified the shortlist of vendors who have the capabilities you need, you can ask more interesting questions around creative solutions to the problem you’re fixing.
Look at the big picture While this may seem simple at first, it’s actually quite complicated. When writing a business communications RFP, you may be tempted to think in terms of physical needs. For example, if you..

Even with all of the advantages large enterprises have in business, inflexibility can hinder the company’s bottom line. But digital transformation is changing that, and large enterprises are in a better position than ever to take advantage of tools that help them be nimble.
In this video, we look at the transformation large enterprises have been going through in the digital age.

My name is Daryl Reva and I am the senior director of product marketing here at Mitel.
How do large enterprises choose communications tools? When you take a look at enterprise applications today, the gatekeeper in that process is typically IT. Whether it's an IT manager or all the way up to the CIO, they want to work with applications or even vendors of those applications that are currently in their basket of technology today.
One of the biggest drawbacks of that is that it's not coming from the user perspective. So what we see a lot is an application that may not fit with the work style, the mob..

There’s lots of buzz around the cloud these days and cloud communications is no exception. But buzz isn’t always an indicator of a business case for technology purchases. Smart businesses are asking what’s driving the rush to the cloud—and they’re getting solid answers. So why are so many businesses moving communications to the cloud today? Here are 10 real-world reasons.
1. Cost Predictable monthly costs. This may seem like old news, but many companies don’t realize just how much they can save by moving their communications to the cloud. By hosting a phone system over the Internet, businesses are charged on an “as needed” basis, paying only for what they use. That makes cloud-based communication systems especially cost-effective for small businesses—eliminating the need to pay for the installation and maintenance of a traditional phone system.
2. Management Outsource IT support to the provider. The management of an on-premise solution can be very expensive. Because of the complexity..

There’s lots of buzz around the cloud these days and cloud communications is no exception. But buzz isn’t always an indicator of a business case for technology purchases. Smart businesses are asking what’s driving the rush to the cloud—and they’re getting solid answers. So why are so many businesses moving communications to the cloud today? Here are 10 real-world reasons.
1. Cost Predictable monthly costs. This may seem like old news, but many companies don’t realize just how much they can save by moving their communications to the cloud. By hosting a phone system over the Internet, businesses are charged on an “as needed” basis, paying only for what they use. That makes cloud-based communication systems especially cost-effective for small businesses—eliminating the need to pay for the installation and maintenance of a traditional phone system.
2. Management Outsource IT support to the provider. The management of an on-premise solution can be very expensive. Because of the complexity..

Technology is changing rapidly. But, when it comes to unified communications and collaboration (UCC), there are easy steps you can take to ensure your investments are primed for the long-run. No matter what tomorrow brings, here are six steps to follow to make the most of your UCC investment and ensure a better path forward for your business.
1. Keep your communications seamless The mobile workforce is not a trend you can expect to fade away anytime soon – in fact, prepare yourself for the opposite. By 2018, it’s expected that 70% of mobile professionals will do business on mobile devices. But mobility should never hinder productivity. Your communications and collaboration tools should be designed with mobile in mind so you can have an in-office experience that’s consistent across all your mobile devices, no matter where you are in the world.
2. Boost your bottom line with significant cost savings Improving your mobile collaboration strategy now can save you big bucks year after year..

It’s vital to know what’s important to your superiors, whether you’re an employee who reports to the Chief Information Officer or a CIO yourself reporting to the ultimate boss, the CEO. And in a world rapidly evolving through digital transformation, you can bet changing technologies, from unified communications and collaboration (UCC) to Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled devices, are top priority.
As a CIO myself, people often ask me, “What keeps CIOs up at night?” It’s almost more accurate to say, “What's not keeping us up at night?” Today’s reality is that there’s a long list of issues and challenges that we deal with on a daily basis.
But before even we get there, I think we should look at how the role of the CIO has been evolving in the past 20 or so years, in terms of our day-to-day responsibilities and functional roles.
Let's get back to the 1990s. In the '90s, the CIO played really a functional role in his or her business – manage the back office, order and set ..