Technology Services

What is UCaaS?

Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) is a subscription service that integrates communication tools such as team messaging, video conferencing, and cloud phone into a seamless user experience. This cloud based solution makes it easier to secure communications, prevent downtime and account for business continuity/disaster recovery. A benefit of UCaaS is its flexibility and scalability in supporting core business tasks. Many UCaaS vendors also offer contact center capabilities, including auto-attendant, interactive voice response, call routing and integration with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. It offers the remote worker all the tools that they would have when working in an office.

What is CPaaS?

Communication Platform as a Service, or CPaaS, is a cloud-based platform where IT teams build and customize their own features.

The primary goal of CPaaS is to enrich customer communication channels. It allows businesses to connect their existing internal communication tools with customer applications through the use of predefined application interfaces or APIs. For example, you could use a chat app API to open a communication path from messaging platforms that your customers likely already use, like Facebook Messenger or Viber, to your own internal messaging application. CPaaS lets developers integrate the entire breadth of real-time, cloud-based communications platforms into their own applications to give customers the best experience available.

This gives organizations greater flexibility when compared to UCaaS, as organizations can personalize their communication capabilities to meet their unique business or security needs and integrate more advanced features at will. However, adding those features is up to the organization and requires a developer skillset.

UCaaS and CPaaS in the modern workplace

Both UCaaS and CPaaS provide streamlined communication tools for organizations, big and small. The “as a service” cloud delivery model means that organizations can access all of their communication tools via the cloud so they don’t have the backend infrastructure management and support costs that premise based communication tools require.

The modern workplace is constantly evolving as businesses keep up with changing markets, consumer behavior and employee needs. Consumers have multiple options for communicating and a business needs to be prepared for all of them. Employees use their computers, smartphones, and tablets to communicate and collaborate from anywhere and at any time. They rely on different forms of communication too, including messaging, video, voice, and emails. The problem is, with so many different modes of communication, the message often becomes fragmented. That’s where UCaaS and CPaaS come into play.

Unified communication solutions combine the essential communication functions into a single platform, so users can get the full message no matter where they are accessing it or by which mode. With a single click, users can switch from team messaging to a video conference without losing their train of thought while opening and logging into a new application. Workers can also move seamlessly from their computers to their phones without missing a beat. UCaaS and CPaaS enable streamlined communication that keeps up with today’s fast-paced workflows.