Building a Strong Base For UC in the Cloud – John Marchese, BlueWater, for Information Week

The cloud computing tornado we’ve all been caught up in hasn’t lost one bit of momentum over the past few months—if anything, additional pressure has been placed on IT to develop a cloud strategy, the sooner the better. However, moving an inefficient business process to the cloud just perpetuates the problem. And, the recent economic climate has meant that the goal of optimizing business processes via technology has often been put on the back burner while organizations focused on reducing operational and capital expenditures.

 

Some stats: 71% of the of 393 business technology professionals responding to our April InformationWeek Analytics Cloud ROI Survey are either using or considering cloud technologies, with software as a service the top response. For 90% of those using or evaluating cloud, IT is in the thick of the decision-making process, putting to rest the idea that business is primarily driving this bandwagon.

 

As trends go, cloud is big. But this is not the first time most of us have been around the hype block. It was only a few years ago when the movement to IP-based private branch exchanges promised to let us ride the unified communications wave all the way to efficiency nirvana. Now that cloud services have emerged as the top prospect to reduce IT capex, expedite delivery of new applications, improve business agility and minimize IT support costs, we need to explore the impact these services have on existing technologies.

 

In this report, we’ll discuss how to prepare for the use of cloud services while extracting the maximum value from what you already own, and from investments you’re preparing to make. To do this, we’ll focus on unified communications; it’s an ideal case study of how to make the most of existing investments while also leveraging the best the cloud has to offer.

 

Read more at:

http://analytics.informationweek.com/abstract/5/3093/Cloud-Computing/strategy-uc-and-the-cloud.html

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BlueWater is focused on providing high-performance, holistic, cohesive IT infrastructure solutions to growing companies. We specialize in providing organizations with Full Life Cycle services in Unified Communications, Collaboration & Video, Virtualization, Consolidation & Data Center, and Security solutions to increase productivity and improve business operations. Our Managed Service, BLUE, provides proactive support and remediation preventing costly downtime, under a flexible contract, utilizing custom technology and industry-standard tools to optimize your IT investment.

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