The size of a business has quickly become a good measure of how they will go about purchasing cloud applications. Whether your customer is an enterprise, mid-market or small business, there is a high likelihood they will be making some sort of cloud purchase based on the reality of today’s business environment.

Cloud computing continues to make market inroads: Public clouds are ubiquitous and the market for multicloud and hybrid solutions is on track to grow billions over the next several years.  However adopting a “one size fits all” approach to cloud can result in frustrations and cost overruns.  The overlapping nature of public, hosted private and on-premise clouds — can make it difficult to determine the right home for your applications.

Selling partners look to TBI for unbiased Provider recommendations and advice on which carrier works to meet their customer's challenges. We use past experience, how easy it is to work with the carrier, actual service quality, deployment and end-user experience to inform partners how best to engage their customers and with what Providers.

Succeeding in an unprecedented time in channel.

In 2017, Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) will continue as one of the top trends shaping the market for business communications services. Businesses of all sizes, notably SMBs, are shifting their focus from being actively interested in UCaaS as an alternative to on premise solutions, to officially adopting UC as a hosted service.

Businesses of all sizes have employees, teams and departments that engage with both internal and external customers on a regular basis. Whether a new business or one already running a 24x7x365 operation, valuable time and money can be wasted maintaining, upgrading, and troubleshooting a contact center system. And when customers need support, if outdated technology gets in the way, businesses can lose much more than sales – they lose opportunities to build long-term customer relationships, eroding the value of your company’s most important asset: customer loyalty and the repeat business it brings.

Although enterprises across the world greatly differ, both culturally and operationally, a commonality they share is the need to connect their disparate workforces. Now more than ever, we’re seeing a sharp, global rise in telecommuting, with 34 percent of business stating that over half of their full-time employees will be working remotely by 2020. While this has benefitted businesses by opening the doors to worldwide talent, it has also created more opportunity for partners to drive new revenue streams from UCaaS.

If you haven’t heard it already from your end customers and prospects, get ready! The workforce of today is increasingly mobile, with 3.7 million employees (a whopping 2.8 percent of the workforce) working from home at least half the time.ⁱ And as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and telecommuting policies are put in place on a grand scale, the demand for unified collaboration and communications (UC&C) solutions is fiercer than ever.

The fast-paced technology landscape is ever changing, and as product sets continue to narrow and end users become more connected than ever before, it’s crucial to understand where the market is headed. Based off what we saw in 2016, here are common business challenges and solutions worth addressing with your customers at the beginning of next year. These range from easy-to-sell products that lead to greater sales to emerging technologies that will spark interest and truly add value.

Suggesting VoIP solutions to companies within healthcare, finance, government, and retail is tricky. Businesses and organizations operating within these verticals are under high levels of legal scrutiny because they frequently transmit sensitive customer and patient data. In order to comply with legislation, they need a hosted voice system that uses strong cryptography and security, such as SSL/TLS or IPsec, to protect data during transmission over public networks and while at rest.

Communicating is an essential part of any office environment. But technology, processes and individual choices can get in the way. As cloud applications are exploding in popularity among businesses both large and small, business communications are moving to the cloud.

Long gone are the days of one device for everything- email, social media, work applications, database and server access, conferencing (web and video), etc. In order to operate a mobile workforce and disparate office locations, corporate communications infrastructure has to adapt. Real time access to corporate systems, access to third-party applications, tools and collaboration software is of the utmost importance; navigating how employees will connect is a top priority for most IT departments.

Collaboration has evolved drastically over the past several years due to the proliferation of unified communications, conferencing and collaboration tools. Learn how your customers can utilize these tools to improve business practices.

How Collaboration and Unified Communications Can Help

In PGi’s 2016 edition of The Future of Business Collaboration we get a preview of what is on the horizon in the era of the mobile workplace. Download the full eBook here.

The finance and healthcare industries share many similarities and challenges when selecting technology solutions. Facing ever-changing regulatory and economic issues coupled with fierce competition, organizations require efficient and speedy UCaaS. Both verticals call for advanced and secure communication and real-time collaboration.

The start of a new year brings promises of a brighter future and exciting new technology. Experts predict quite a few developments in the coming year as communications continue to grow. No one knows what exactly 2016 will hold but here are TBI’s top predictions:

According to Gartner’s 2014 Market Trends report, "Key Trends in Unified Communications Technology, Adoption and Delivery", by 2017 approximately 48% of IT planners expect the cloud to be their primary deployment model for U.C. functionality.

There are many benefits your customer can gain by moving his voice or total communications to the cloud. For example, both Hosted VoIP and UCaaS will get your customer out of the time-consuming business of buying, maintaining, and updating his own hardware and software systems.

By the year 2018,the Unified Communications as a Service  (UCaaS) market will reach $5.3 billion. This is according to market research firm Wainhouse Research.

While high-level catch phrases won the day in non-IT circles this past year, the emergence of unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) — packaged telephony functions integrated with messaging, mobile, and productivity apps — made 2014 the year of voice.