Hi I’m Jess, with Loffler’s IT Solutions Group,
here to talk about Unified Communications,
what that means for your business and some trends to
look forward to in 2018.
Three key areas we can talk about today, one being collaboration,
that’s been something that’s been talked about forever.
Mobility, but more so focusing on apps and how
those apps can help enhance your business.
And then cloud. Cloud has been a word out there for a
while, but now it’s becoming much more relevant
in the industry today and I think we’re going to see a big spike
in the next coming years, especially next year.
If you’re not talking about it already, we should definitely have
a conversation about it.
So collaboration, that’s tools using Office 365, the phone
system, just enabling a better platform for your employees
to collaborate and work more efficiently with each other.
Most phone systems today have workspaces
or integrations with Office 365
that we can share documents easily, create instant 
video conferences, keep running chat sessions
and just keep everything in one centralized workspace.
So a phone system whether that be a traditional 
premise phone system or in the cloud,
that’s definitely more of what companies are looking 
forward to today and options out there.
Collaboration is something that we should focus on.
Apps, so I mentioned mobility, that’s been a buzzword 
for year and years.
Now we’re going to take away mobility and focus on apps.
Call center, call recording, I mentioned chat collaboration, 
is also an application.
Emergency notification, video collaboration, 
these are all
productivity enhancing tools that seamlessly are 
integrating to phone systems today.
Whether you need the emergency notification, a lot of 
these applications are bolt on to what you have today.
So you many not need them, 
some companies may need them.
Reporting is another huge area.
So just getting those metrics of what your employees
are doing, how they working together
and trying to be more efficient.
Apps are something we should focus on.
The last thing is cloud.
I mentioned that’s going to be a huge driver going 
into next year and the years to come but,
really that subscription as a service is becoming a good
operational efficiency and cost.
The simplicity, reliability, scalability and security
are all reasons that if you’re not considering cloud,
just for your phone system but also business drivers,
we should take a look at.
It integrates easily with salesforce.com or a CRM integration.
That ability to subscribe or pay as you go can be a huge 
benefit to some organizations.
It can also leverage technology such as SD-WAN, if you 
ever heard of SD-WAN, google it!
It’s a technology that allows us to hybrid
your existing bandwidth and connectivity between offices,
so if you haven’t taken a look at some technology 
behind that, let us know.
Also, if you haven’t evaluated your phone contracts in a while
with your ISP providers, well let’s take a look at that.
That’s often an area that’s overlooked. 
And we can definitely get some,
either increase your bandwidth for what you’re paying for today,
or decrease spend and use that to purchase a new phone 
system or subscription in the cloud.
