Digium CEO Danny Windham made one thing clear during his keynote presentation at ITEXPO 2015: Businesses of all kinds, at every developmental level, can and must get started with unified communications as a service (UCaaS).

So, why must every business get the ball rolling? According to Windham, we’re on the frontend of a change involving communications moving to the cloud, but this change is a little different. “This change has shifted the business model of the end user; the way we’re communicating is changing and where we communicate is changing. As such, our existing communication products and services are struggling to allow us to be as productive as a user who is in one location.”

For many businesses, especially SMBs, keeping up with this move to UCaaS is daunting. Nonetheless, firms are being called to communications to enable business processes for efficiency. “Business communications used to be about a phone on a desk; today there are dozens of different tools that each boast a unique utility, allowing employees to get certain tasks and jobs done best,” Windham says. “These need to be better integrated.”

An Actionable UCaaS Strategy for Businesses at Every Level

According to Windham, businesses at every developmental level can ride this massive UCaaS wave. To solidify his point, he provided an actionable plan that businesses at every stage can implement to get started. It’s all about assessing where your organization is today and then selecting the next appropriate step to advance your individual situation:

• Traditional: “Even if you tell me your boss is a Luddite and that you haven’t invested in your communications equipment in 10 years, a simple step you can take to ride this wave is to buy a current communications product, such as a UC system, which incorporates support for other modes of communication other than voice,” Windham advised.
• Mildly progressive: Be selective about the products you buy, Windham advises, and invest in products that allow you to make API-enabled advancements. “Manufacturers are using those APIs to deliver canned integrations out of the box,” he said. For example, a CRM solution with canned levels of integration can allow a salesperson to record a sales call and automatically attach it to a CRM record.
• Moderately progressive: Use the API to communications-enable just one business process within your company, Windham suggested. For example, a dentist’s office can use its API to have its Resource and Patient Management System initiate a call from its UC solution to play a prerecorded message reminding patients of upcoming appointments, freeing up office staff to do more meaningful work and, thus, increasing ROI.
• Cautiously adventurous: “The next appropriate step in this class is to deploy an open source engine to give the user ultimate control of integration and customizations,” Windham explained. He also advised businesses in this class to not let themselves be limited by API constraints.
• Aggressively adventurous: “Introduce yourself to the world of Web communications,” said Windham. In other words, businesses in this class should consider writing custom communications scripts using current Web technologies, like Java and HTML.

But what about businesses that feel like they’ve done it all? For those businesses with a “bring it on” attitude, Windham has one piece of advice: Build it. Be the pioneer, the trailblazer, and the one who leads the way towards continuous innovation.