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UC as a Service - UCAAS

SaintGroup offers organisations end-to-end Unified Communications as a Service to enhance business collaboration and communication. SaintGroup’ UCaaS provides all the benefits of a dedicated enterprise grade PBX with the additional flexibility, resilience and cost savings that a converged, hosted solution can offer.

It has been designed to accelerate business processes, reduce travelling time, enable companies to only pay for what they need, when they need it, and to allow them to concentrate on their customers while SaintGroup manages their communications from desktop through to PBX. SaintGroup UCaaS is more than a hosted PBX with handsets and soft clients for users. It is a fully integrated end-to-end service incorporating user devices/clients, LAN infrastructure, carrier network, enterprise class PBX and SIP breakout/minutes.

SaintGroup provides a fully featured communications solution within a virtual platform which, feature for feature, exactly replicates or compliments that of physical hardware commonly located within customer premises. The unified communications solution developed by SaintGroup overcomes challenges met by businesses looking for viable and cost effective platforms that are effective for head office, mobile working or disparate environments.

SaintGroup UCaaS provides customers access to enterprise grade telephony functionality on a per user subscription. It is a fully configurable dedicated Virtual Communications software solution installed on a shared platform hosted in SaintGroup’ Tier 3 data centre; the software is the same as that being used for on premise, only it resides in the SaintGroup data centre and has a ‘per user, per month’ pricing structure.

Businesses benefit from increased productivity through heightened functionality using features such as Audio Web Conferencing, Presence and Instant Messaging. Additionally, Phone, Soft Phone Client, Mobile Client each provide a common user experience for all features, while Unified Mailboxes enable faxes, emails and voicemails to be found more quickly in one place.

Costs are simple to calculate with per user per month licences and become manageable and predictable. Features are grouped together to license bundles allowing differing user types to be catered for. Companies no longer need three connections into their building for Private Data, Internet and ISDN and instead will utilise the capacity on the WAN, reducing the Total Cost of Ownership. Excellent call rates and a rationalisation of voice channels provide significant cost reductions, as can homeworker licences and mobile clients using corporate pence-per-minute rates as opposed to mobile and home phone packages.

Businesses do not suffer downtime when opening and closing offices as the PBX is in the cloud; nor do they need to ensure UC skilled resources in order to administer the system. Resilience is improved as traditional telephony software is tied to a proprietary piece of hardware. With UCaaS, virtual machines failover to other physical servers in the event of hardware failure. Proactive monitoring of hardware and software gives an early warning of potential issues and allows SaintGroup to utilise their additional physical servers within the datacentre to ensure a 1 hour hardware replacement service level agreement. The data centre environment is also inherently more resilient than an on-premise solution with advanced power, cooling and fire suppression systems.

Customers have the option of engaging with SaintGroup to fully administer the service on their behalf or to retain UC skilled and accredited resources in-house. In either scenario, SaintGroup is responsible for the platform, its environment and the software in terms of availability and fault resolution within its Tier 3 Data Centre facility.

Key services include Hot-Desking, allowing employees to log into an IP phone and access personal preferences with their calls routed to the device they are logged in to; Dynamic Extension, freeing users to select a number of devices, regardless of device type, to act as their business phone, with all their phone numbers collapsing into just one single number identity through their business extension; Unified Messaging for users to retrieve and manage all forms of messages via their phone, email inbox, or web browser; Teleworker functionality that enables employees to work remotely with full access to voice mail, conferencing, and other office phone system features; Audio Web Conferencing combining a feature-rich audio conferencing solution with web conferencing facilities; Soft Client facilities that deliver rich presence and availability, desk phone and softphone integration, directory access, detailed call history, secure instant messaging and point-to-point video, and Mobile Client, which extends common PBX features to the mobile device, and provides a truly integrated mobile and desktop experience by enabling seamlessly switching communications from one device to another.

SaintGroup UCaaS provides a unique end-user experience for those that require the functionality of a dedicated on premise solution with the commercial and operational flexibility provided by the Cloud.