I met an Office Manager recently in a Financial organisation. He had an interesting story to tell.

They had to implement voice recording as a part of the Central Bank’s Consumer Protection Code.

So, the company went out to the market, looked at some options, choose one, installed it and………it’s been nothing but trouble. Analog calls can’t be recorded, extension numbers are not visible, and reporting is practically impossible. It is installed for the past three months, and the support team are doing their best, but it just isn’t successful.

The voice recording company is obviously not going to say anything but trying to connect a brand-new voice recording system with a ten-year-old PBX is bound to cause some issues.

Voice telephony technology in this area has changed so much over the past number of years. It’s like trying to use your old record turntable to play an MP3!!

But what else can a company do in this situation? There are specific legal requirements that need to be met, and most SME’s can’t afford to throw out all their hardware and start over again.

The answer is UCaaS – Unified Communications as a Service.

With Unified Communications, multiple modes of business communications are seamlessly integrated. Unified Communications is not a single product but a collection of elements that include:

• Call control and recording
• Presence
• Instant messaging
• Unified messaging
• Speech
• Conferencing
• Collaboration tools
• Business process integration (BPI)UCaaS is provided with a service so that an organisation can decide to have as many (or as little) of the UC stack as is needed at any given point in a company’s development lifecycle. UCaaS helps SME’s avail of these wonderful new technologies that up until now were exclusively available to large business and multinationals.

The great thing about UCaaS is the flexibility which the operational expense model provides to us. There is no capital outlay for any of these elements, and we can turn them on and off as required.

UCaaS is a levelling of the playing field, so it doesn’t matter if you are a ten-person company or a 10,000-person company, these fantastic business enhancing products are available to all.

Even voice recording!!