The cloud calling and cloud-based video conferencing market is booming, with research highlighting that the enterprise segment of this market is expected to accelerate to $4,48-billion by 2023.
The growth is being fuelled not just by practical reasons for hosting these applications in the cloud, such as costs and the reduction in infrastructure dependencies, but also in part by user behaviour.
“The way the everyday user communicates has changed dramatically. People opt to use WhatsApp calls or FaceTime over traditional network calling as it is not only cheaper, but adds the element of the visual call too,” states Mandre Stander, Collaboration and Networking Channel Manager at Westcon-Comstor, Sub-Saharan Africa. “When it comes to business calling, the trend is following suit, as meetings move away from the boardroom and towards video calling / conferencing applications.”
According to Stander the simplicity of the available solutions, like the Westcon-Comstor CloudCall cloud-based calling solution, means that customers can make instant connections on the go, without being anchored to a physical office or a traditional phone. But more importantly, he says the economies of scale, the reduction in physical infrastructure, and the flexibility of being able to upgrade at any time – are particularly appealing for IT teams trying to cut down on costs.
One challenge however is that many physical infrastructures still exist, and businesses are reticent to just replace what is still working. But this can be overcome by taking a hybrid approach to mapping out calling systems, where a company can host components in the cloud and others on-premise. This requires vendor interoperability or collaboration – something that is becoming increasingly common, as can be evidenced with Microsoft Teams, modern users refuse to even consider solutions that are proprietary.
“Putting your voice and video applications in the cloud is not just about cost savings. Yes that is seen as a pretty compelling reason, but cloud video conferencing architecture solves many of the limitations of on-premise deployments. When hosting video calls on a cloud provider’s server instead of using an on-premise video bridge gives a user immediate scalability, security, manageability, accessibility, and flexible pricing. None of which is afforded by an on-premise solution,” states Stander.
The new CloudCall solution from Westcon-Comstor provides customers with a cloud calling offering that packages Hardware-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service Communications and is delivered directly from the cloud. It has been built from the ground up and combines the power of Microsoft Teams and AudioCodes. With CloudCall a customer can benefit from communications and collaboration, in the cloud, or can in part be hosted on premise too if a customer has a requirement.
“Customers don’t want to be locked into the solution they purchase, they want it to draw from best of breed applications like Microsoft Teams and be scalable in operation and costs. Looking at how the behaviour of customers and end users has changes and marrying this with what our reseller partners are calling for – we developed CloudCall, not as a bundle, but a fully working solution that a reseller can deploy at a customer site and the end user can start communicating almost immediately. In short, it is a monetised cloud calling service that our partners can deploy, manage and capitalise on instantly,” he ends.