The announcement that Verizon is offering global unified communication cloud service is good news for companies all over the world.
Large organizations tend to be slower to adopt new technology, and the cloud is no exception. Such wariness has its logic: with their scale, a wrong decision implemented across a large organization can be crippling. However, too much prudence can undermine a company's competitive position and ability to innovate, risking market share.
A strategy to mitigate this risk includes adopting cloud with a hybrid approach. This methodology enables an organization to keep its mission-critical applications on-premise in its private cloud. At the same time, it thoughtfully expands operations to the public cloud. There's less risk but all the benefits of embracing new technology.
Multinational companies face a unique set of challenges. For these companies, moving to cloud is so much more than moving applications and data to a service provider's data center. They need services that can span multiple data centers-preferably from the same provider. Furthermore, these services need to be consistent -and compatible -across borders.
That's why Verizon's UCaaS is so exciting. As Anthony Recine, chief marketing officer at Verizon Enterprise Solutions said, the aim of this new service is to provide multinationals with a "globally consistent offering for delivering UC as a service." Verizon's deployment of Cisco Powered cloud services enables multinational companies to move to the cloud on a global scale with confidence.
Part of the value of Verizon's offering is its hybrid capabilities. Companies can choose the services they need at the scale they need them. To be able to achieve this took significant investment from Verizon, not just in technology, but in how the company structures delivery and pricing.
The new global UCaaS service is built on the Cisco Powered Hosted Collaboration Solution. The offering will be integrated with Cisco Collaboration Meeting Room Cloud when available in July to include voice, video and web conferencing. And, Contact Center services with mobility are expected to be added later in 2015.
For more details on Verizon's new UCaaS offering, see the company's official release.