UCaaS stands for Unified Communications as a Service and is a cloud-delivered model that provides a variety of communication and collaboration applications and services, as a single managed service. The cloud-delivered unified communications structure can support up to six main functions:

  • Full enterprise telephony solutions
  • Instant messaging and presence capability
  • Virtual meetings with web conferencing
  • Unified messaging
  • Mobility across device types
  • Communications-enabled business processes

With UCaaS, the underlying infrastructure is owned, operated, maintained and delivered by the provider themselves. As Gartner states:

Typical characteristics include multitenancy (including tenant partitions residing on shared UC infrastructure, such as data centers, racks, compute, network, common equipment and blades) and self-service web portals for provisioning, management and performance/usage reporting. The provider delivers applications from a common platform and licenses the service for a monthly, recurring, subscription charge.

At Colt, our UCaaS solution is referred to as Intelligent Communications, and is powered by Microsoft 365. We differentiate ourselves by leveraging our unique global voice footprint to provide you with the very best end-to-end experience.

Understanding UC

With the cloud becoming the obvious choice for enterprise application delivery, the as-a-service model also seems natural to apply to Unfied Communications. However, some organisations still prefer the traditional model.

Traditional Unified Communications systems are typically deployed on-premises, with hardware and software deployed on an organisation’s own servers. This generally comes with a high upfront CapEx for purchasing and maintaining the necessary infrastructure. By delivering this locally, this means these solutions can be highly customised to suit specific needs, and enable deep control over things such as security, updates and maintenance. The drawback being that scaling these systems can quite easily become pretty complex and costly, especially when needing additional hardware.

The rise of UCaaS

Unlike it’s on-premises version, UCaaS is delivered via the cloud, meaning the service provider hosts and manages the infrastructure. UCaaS is delivered as a subscription-based model, effectively removing any concerns for CapEx spend. Costs are significantly more predictable and spread out, and service providers are often able to leverage economies of scale to deliver a high quality service at a reduced rate.

These also mean that additional changes and customisation is made via the service provider rather than by the consumer, reducing the total flexibility possible, but the trade-off against this is a total offloading of delivery and maintence from internal IT teams.

Despite security concerns, the reality, especially in a hosted environment, is that the practices, capabilities and requirements of a service provider often far exceed those of the customer.

In order to ensure you find the right supplier that you can trust to deliver an always-on service, look for certifications such as:

  • ISO/IEC 27001 – the only auditable international standard defining requirements for an Information Security Management System (ISMS) ensuring adequate and proportionate security controls have been established
  • SO9001:2008 – an internationally recognised standard for quality management systems, which is licensed to just over one million organisations worldwide and is accepted as the basis for demonstration of well-managed processes which meet applicable statutory and regulatory requirements.

Colt’s UCaaS solution

Our UCaaS solution, Colt Intelligent Communications, run on Microsoft’s flagship Microsoft 365 cloud-based platform, ensuring a familiar desktop experience and providing immersive unified communications via Teams. Performance is guaranteed with Colt’s connectivity to the cloud and voice breakout based on Colt’s Tier 1 high performance network, removing frustrating and disruptive service interruptions.

Colt Intelligent Communications now delivers new automation and AI features that save employees time, remove the need to manually switch between screens and applications, and help them work together more productively. These features include:

  • Auto-joining scheduled Teams meetings
  • Built-in generative AI platforms including Microsoft Copilot
  • Enhanced analytics and performance data following Teams meetings.

AI and automation present tremendous opportunities for business to secure a competitive advantage, but the reality is that many organisations are still in the early stages of exploring their potential. By integrating AI and automation features into Colt Intelligent Communications, we’ve made it easy for them to dip their toes into the water and create an outstanding connected employee experience which transforms and amplifies productivity. Now, more countries than ever can benefit from our cloud voice and data expertise coupled with our powerful, secure digital infrastructure.

Tyler Hemmen, VP Enterprise Products and Solutions, Colt Technology Services

We’ve also recently expanded our UCaaS capabilities with availability in seven further European countries. The additional countries  – Czech Republic, Finland, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Romania and Slovakia – mean businesses can now benefit from the quality, security and flexibility delivered by Colt’s suite of fully-compliant cloud voice services in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and Japan.