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Every year, more businesses are migrating to communications solutions that are delivered from the cloud instead of using traditional on-premises equipment. If you were to take a snapshot in time, it would show that 54 percent of businesses are currently looking to move to the cloud. That translates to about 23 million individual users.
In a recent webinar, Joe Herde, Director of Product Marketing for Mitel MiCloud Connect, and Scott Brodie, a Mitel sales engineer, answered audience questions about cloud migration and how it helps future proof communications. To help you understand what cloud communications mean for your business, here’s a Q&A version of their responses:
Why are businesses moving away from on-premises communications solutions?
Businesses are looking for different capabilities than they’ve had in the past. They want their staff to be able work from different locations. They want to be mobile, and they want software and tools that help them better engage with customers.
There’s also the “millennial factor.” There’s a whole generation of individuals who prefer to send a text message or have a chat session rather than pick up the phone and call someone. Businesses need to support all of these different types of communications channels.
For businesses that are expanding and merging with other companies, cloud-based communications are a great way to provide a consistent set of capabilities to new teams, support new branch offices and engage with customers in different regions.
Another key driver is the need to streamline operations to focus on the core business and ensure processes are aligned with communications tools and interaction styles.
And finally, when it’s time to refresh, renew or replace existing on-premises solutions, the cloud just makes a lot of sense.
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What makes cloud communications solutions future proof?
A truly future-proof cloud communications solution delivers the best of everything:
- A consistent set of features and functions no matter where people are
- An intuitive and simple, but powerful, user experience across all features and functions
- The flexibility to mix and match new and advanced features with essential features and to change feature bundles and licensing as needed
- The ability to integrate with customer relationship management and other backend systems
- Extremely high reliability
- Affordability
- No downtime during installation and implementation
It sounds like a wish list, but it’s all possible. Mitel MiCloud Connect allows teams to work from anywhere using voice, chat, video, file sharing and other capabilities. It’s very reliable, provides a consistent user experience across mobile phones, desk phones and desktop apps and it’s available through flexible and interchangeable subscriptions.
How are cloud communications more cost-effective than on-premises solutions that are paid for?
The key is to compare total cost of ownership for on-premises and cloud solutions.
With on-premises solutions, you may have already paid for the hardware and licenses, but you have to consider the many additional costs these solutions require. Those costs include:
- Telecom services
- Ongoing license renewals
- Ongoing PBX maintenance and upgrades
- Space, power and cooling costs for backroom equipment
- In-house technical staff to maintain, administer and manage the solution
All of these costs apply, even if you have a contract with a Mitel partner, or another third-party company, to provide those services.
With a cloud solution, there are very few fees to consider and no hidden fees. You pay your subscription fee, the costs of the handsets and connectivity you need and that’s it. Even if you bring in new hires after the cloud solution is deployed, the cost of training them is included in the monthly subscription fee.
If you compare the total cost of an on-premises solution over its lifetime to the total cost of a cloud solution over the same period of time, you’ll see why we say cloud solutions are the more cost-effective approach.
In fact, we have models that show there’s a minimum 60 percent savings in total cost of ownership with cloud communications. If you’d like to see the models, please reach out to your Mitel partner and they’ll be happy to talk you through all the details.
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How does Mitel roll out cloud communications across multiple sites, offices or locations?
We have a number of technologies and processes in place that allow us to be as flexible as possible during rollouts. For example, depending on the connectivity that’s being used, there are different ways for cloud solutions to communicate with legacy systems.
In addition, we can provision cloud solutions to support many users, but not activate all of them or charge you for them until they’re needed. This makes it easy to add users at different sites when it makes sense. The licensing flexibility we provide is particularly helpful to businesses with seasonal requirements where they may need to give more people access to communications services around holiday periods or in the summer.
We can also do phased migrations and staged rollouts based on different sites, office locations, sections of offices, departments and other criteria. The users involved in each phase are fully trained in how the solution works and how phones can be programmed so they’re ready to start using the solution as soon as it’s live.
How does Mitel handle the transition from on-premises solutions to cloud solutions?
We’re the market leader in total number of cloud users with nearly 5.1 million business users worldwide, so we have a huge amount of experience helping companies make their move to the cloud. We understand what works and what doesn’t.
We’ve put a lot of thought and effort into how we can make the transition to the cloud as seamless as possible for our customers and how we can protect their existing investments. For example, if you have Mitel 6900 series or 400 series IP phones, you can reuse those phones with Mitel MiCloud Connect.
There are a number of other ways we simplify your transition to the cloud, and we truly believe no one makes your move to the cloud easier than we do.
Watch for part 2 of our cloud migration blog series
In our next blog post, we’ll share more of Joe’s and Scott’s insights into our cloud migration initiatives related to handsets, licensing and features, along with their answers to additional questions. You can watch the full webinar on how Mitel can help you future-proof your communications technology here.
