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Taking the next steps to cloud voice

When overlayed with cognitive services and artificial intelligence, cloud voice becomes so much more than just a call over the internet.

There are a lot of misconceptions on the whole topic of cloud voice but the thing I always go back to is that it's not just about voice and calling. What I'm finding is that probably the biggest challenge about cloud voice is when it's viewed as a bespoke solution. We don't look at it all in that manner.

We look at cloud voice and calling as an addition to an organisation's current productivity stack -- integrated into that solution set.

What an organisation can very quickly get into -- and I see it from customers every day -- is inquiring about charges around voice minutes and what are you charging per user. That's a commodity discussion.

The real value, as a business, is not having the discussion around voice minutes but having one that revolves around the value of bringing voice into a complete, intelligent solution.

The real misconceptions I am seeing are:

  • It's a standalone technology
  • People aren't doing a proper business case behind the true value of what voice brings as part of a holistic productivity stack.
  • People are not looking at the upgrade costs of existing environments to stay relevant,and these costs are omitted when looking at cloud voice.

When you don't take these things into consideration, you aren't getting proper pricing models and some customers may look at models as being too expensive. However, if you look at the total Collaboration stack and being a total solution to your end user, it becomes a very different picture. If you look at the ability to scale up or scale down, without the need for investment in hardwareor resources,you start to see greater infrastructure alignment to business objectives and strategies, and that's where the benefits really start to show.

The message behind cloud voice is not one that is polluted by commodity discussions; it has to be a workplaceproductivity discussion.

If you are not in a cloud environment for collaboration services including Cloud Voice, the opportunity to leverage things like cognitive services, intelligent communications, artificial intelligence and analytics inside of the voice stack becomes a null game. By moving to the cloud and into cloud voice, you start to overlay intelligence into that same environment.

With AI already here, and the next evolution of cognitive services coming, this is real. It gives a much richer insight into the experience a customer is having and then you can overlay AI and other components over that to feed withreal time information into the voice services.

This is why I get so excited. As soon as you take a service and put it into the cloud, you open a gateway to all APIs, each pulling pieces of information to support that business in real time. I think once you put it into the cloud your opportunities and horizons truly open up.

See the real benefits when you put voice in the cloud.

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