Why is "UC as a Service" like a Gym membership?
One interesting way to compare "UC as a Service" to traditional business communications solutions is to consider the following analogy:
Let’s say you decide you’re interested in getting in shape, and you’d like to take up cycling as a form of exercise. You may decide to join a gym with a per-month membership cost, or you may decide to purchase an exercise bicycle for your home. Different people may make that decision in different ways, but either way, in this case, there’s arguably not that much difference between ‘owning’ or ‘renting’. It’s probably fair to say that this has been the state of our market when comparing PBXs to IP Centrex.
But now let’s say you really decide to get in shape: in addition to your simple exercise bicycle, you realize that what you need is a basketball court, a swimming pool, a sauna, and specialized weight machines for strength training different muscle groups.
You certainly could buy all of this for your house (although it’s also possible you may need to move into a bigger house in order to buy all these things). You’re also going to have to spend a great deal of money on maintaining these machines.
But wouldn’t it be smarter to just join a gym and use all of those fitness machines, the pool, and the basketball court when you needed it for a simple pay-per-month price?
This is really how Unified Communications has changed the buy vs. ‘outsource’ debate from the days of Centrex and PBX. UC is now not only real, but it’s also complex and costly enough that except for perhaps the largest of large enterprises, it’s a much more rational model to utilize UC – but in a hosted, services-based model.