Unified Communications On-Premise or In-Cloud?

Local or hosted, UC platforms excel in multimodal (voice, messaging, video, etc.) environments.

Canadian non-profit organization Kids Help Phone has run a toll-free call center support line for teens for children since 1989. Kids Help Phone counselors are in the business of saving kids’ lives every day. Until a few years ago, the phone sufficed, but today’s youths aren’t so single-track in their communications.

Many kids prefer the anonymity of texting. Some prefer email. Others may opt for a voice connection, and a few may want to bounce from one medium to the next. This is the sort of multimodal environment in which a unified communications platform excels.

Kids Help Phone turned to ComputerTalk , one of Canada’s leadingUC solutions providers, and ComputerTalk in turn suggested Microsoft Lync along with its own “ice” call center product. Kids Help Phone could have run this combined UC solution on-premise in new servers or straight from ComputerTalk’s own data centers.

Being a cash-tight non-profit, the choice was simple.

“We don’t have the ability to work on a business plan, get a lending institution’s support, and have a three- to five-year plan to recoup those investment costs,” says Ted Kaiser, vice president of information technology at Kids Help Phone. “Charities have to operate in such a way that they raise what they can and spend it in a given year. You can’t build up a capital fund in the same way that commercial organizations can. So financially and operationally, this Cloud model makes sense for us.”

Moreover, being a Web-based service proved indispensable only days after deployment, because protests to the Toronto G20 summit practically outside the non-profit’s front door forced workers to set up shop across town. Armed with laptops, headsets, and Cloud-based UC, Kids Help Phone never missed a single query. Had the organization run on-premise UC, its services would likely have been interrupted.

Of course, not every business should prefer hosted services. Just because UC services can be similar across hosting platforms doesn’t mean they’re necessarily interchangeable on a functional or even an accounting basis.

“Hosted and Cloud are different architectures, with different value propositions,” says from Bob Fahey, senior director of online services at Avanade. “For example, hosters usually make you sign multi-year commitments. Public Cloud providers don’t.”

Generally, a vendor-hosted Cloud infrastructure is designed to service very many end-users with a generic but satisfactory experience. These Cloud services are not usually custom-tailored for individual needs. It’s very unlikely that a business could persuade a multi-national Cloud provider to tweak its platform in order to integrate with another program designed in-house.

On the other hand, this is exactly the sort of work that some regional partners do when hosting UC services for clients. Client-side integration is one of the key ways in which providers can differentiate themselves.

Another way for local UC providers to add value is through service. Businesses may be attached to PBX vendors who rolled a support truck whenever help was needed. People naturally like feeling personally tended to. A UC provider can offer this same touch factor and speed of remediation while still bringing clients up to a 21^st century digital communications platform.

William Van Winkle has been a full-time tech writer and author since 1998. He specializes in a wide range of coverage areas, including unified communications, virtualization, Cloud Computing, and more. William lives in Hillsboro, Oregon with his wife and 2.4 kids, and—when not scrambling to meet article deadlines—he enjoys reading, travel, and writing fiction.