What is Cloud Communications?
Cloud Communications is more than simply VoIP, hosted PBX, CaaS or Unified Communications. It’s an entirely new way to build, deploy, and scale enterprise communications systems. It goes further than VoIP & UC to reduce equipment costs, provide higher-definition services with unmatched quality, and deliver a platform of advanced features that allow employees to work in ways – and places - they never imagined.
What Are The Benefits of Cloud Communications?
Cloud Communications gives enterprises more powerful communications that drive employee productivity and satisfaction; more scalable communications that adapt quickly and efficiently to changing business conditions; more easily managed communications that free IT resources to focus on strategic initiatives; and reduced operational and capital costs. In short – a completely different enterprise communications experience.
How Do I Know If I am Really Getting Cloud Communications?
The Cloud Communications Alliance has defined a “Cloud-Certified” standard that will allow enterprises to evaluate providers and ensure they are getting true Cloud Communications:
Fully Hosted, Extensible and Scalable Platform – “Cloud-Certified” communications service providers use industry-leading switching platforms from BroadSoft to offer voice, data, video, and mobility communications across their enterprise and multi-location businesses.
Carrier-Grade Infrastructure – “Cloud-Certified” communications service providers house their platform in highly secure, geographically redundant data centers containing fault-tolerant servers that are load-balanced from server-to-server. In the unlikely event that one data center is unavailable, communications traffic is automatically routed to other data centers, ensuring business continuity and minimum disruption to business operations.
Applications Programming Interface (API) – “Cloud-Certified” communications service providers offer open APIs providing customers with the ability to integrate communications components with their business process applications. These API functions allow resources to be defined and addressed over HTTP (and in some cases bits of XML). APIs are simple and developer agnostic; and since it is mostly HTTP calls, developers may rapidly adapt to the guidelines of the API.
SIP Protocol – “Cloud-Certified” Communications service providers typically use the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) open standard to deliver communications services. This enables them to offer a wide range of hardware to their clients.
High Definition Voice (G.722 Codec) – “Cloud-Certified” communications service providers deliver High Definition (HD) voice using a wideband technology to deliver a deeper clarity and better audio experience. Traditional telephony is based on sampling the sound stream 8,000 times a second, thus constraining the reproduction of the sound spectrum to the range between 200Hz on the low end and to 3.3KHz on the high end. With HD voice, a wideband codec (G.722) doubles the sampling rate and more than doubles the width of the sound spectrum reproduced from 50 Hz to 7KHz.
Reliability Backed by Service Level Agreement (SLA) – “Cloud-Certified” communications service providers offer specific SLAs that establish objective tools and processes to measure and verify compliance along with appropriate incentives or penalties based on service performance and reliability.
