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As companies expand across different buildings, geographies, and time zones, traditional enterprise phone systems no longer suffice. Today’s business leaders seek innovative solutions that offer flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and seamless integration across their entire organization. Managed communication services (MCS) provide a comprehensive and cost-efficient approach to powering a company's communication infrastructure. These cloud-based solutions unify various applications, enabling streamlined collaboration across multiple offices and locations. By empowering workforces with enhanced connectivity…

SD-WAN Benefits: Starting with The Basics SD-WAN benefits may be complex to understand, especially for people who own a business but do not have an IT-related background. This post will help you learn the basics of this technology and why it improves your company’s bandwidth and costs. The acronym SD-WAN stands for Software-Defined Wide-Area Network. Compared to a traditional WAN, SD-WANs are based on software, not hardware. Therefore, they are…

Unified communications systems can prove transformative to your business. However, finding the right tools for your specific needs and supporting the underlying technologies needed to put those solutions in place is a complex matter. The challenge is well worth tackling as a modern UC system can: Reduce travel costs by allowing for powerful videoconferencing capabilities. Keep employees engaged by creating more personal means for corporate communications. Foster collaboration as the ability…

Information and communications technologies are intersecting in new ways, giving enterprise employees opportunities to work and engage customers in more intuitive ways. IT systems have long played an instrumental role in working in the background behind communications systems. However, they haven't generally done much to make them better. Advanced network systems may allow for high-quality voice performance, but that is still a situation where IT is supporting good communications functions, not…

Collaboration is more important -- and easier -- than ever, thanks to tools for sharing documents, instant communication and workflow tracking. However, too many collaboration tools can often be counterproductive. Many companies purchase Microsoft Office 365, but retain competing legacy collaboration tools. In fact, BCM One has found that many of our clients who have Microsoft Office 365 are only using it for email, nothing else. There’s no need to…

In the not-so-distant past, VARs and system integrators sold software and cloud, and there was a Telephony agent who you went to for your carrier business. Now everyone is becoming a one-stop shop for everything under the sun. Traditional telecom companies are selling the cloud. Cloud providers offer telecom services. Where the lines exist at all, they’re extremely blurry. Some companies think they can remain inside their comfort zones, providing…

Author: Traci Blowers Microsoft SME & Manager, Cloud Operations for BCM One No doubt you’ve heard about Skype for Business Voice. You can use this to replace your current PBX and phone carrier. Still, you want to make that transition as seamless as possible. Your phone system is the lifeline of your business, so a careful approach is essential. So how do you decide which partner to work with if…

See the complete webinar here. Transcript SD-WAN has the ability to identify e-mail traffic. We all know e-mail traffic is very important to businesses, but it's not necessarily time-sensitive. So SD-WAN will choose the lowest-cost link. And that's where e-mail traffic will flow. So let's say that lower-cost link has some major delay on it and will throw in some packet loss. Well, SD-WAN's real-time circuit monitoring will recognize that…

Balancing business flexibility with cybersecurity can be a somewhat overwhelming challenge, but it is increasingly important as IT and corporate leaders work in tandem to protect company data. The problem is that business and technology leaders have vastly different priorities when it comes to security, something that is underlined by a recent study from The Economist Intelligence Unit and VMware. "Business and technology leaders have vastly different priorities when it comes…

We recently discussed how transparency into relationships with managed services providers can pay dividends for businesses. Similarly, deepening insights into every detail of IT operations can fuel value creation. IT transparency and value creation are closely linked as having a clear understanding of the nuances of how IT systems operate can empower business and technology leaders to ensure investments deliver returns. The problem is that many IT departments are functionally siloed,…

Businesses have long depended on technology to get the job done. This reliance on technology has long fueled a relationship in which business and IT units have been segregated from one another. The enterprise operates to meet customer needs and drive profits, and IT exists to support those tasks. This longstanding relationship is changing, but how do you adjust your culture around a new world of responsive IT that is…

Vendor partnerships are a key strategic issue in the managed services provider sector. MSPs will partner with vendors to be certified as specialists with those technologies, giving them added clout when working with businesses that want specific solutions. If a company likes the Microsoft Cloud ecosystem, for example, an MSP that is a Microsoft partner will often be best positioned to meet those needs. However, this is the simplest explanation…

Virtualization has been transforming IT infrastructure strategies. It began with server virtualization. Establishing virtual machines within single systems allowed one server to host dozens of applications, changing the way data centers operate by allowing apps to use system resources on an as-needed basis. This process extended out to storage, network and desktop systems, creating software-defined data centers. Virtualization's rise has also led to more discussions around the idea of software-defined…

Big data is a major point of discussion when businesses explore digital transformation. In theory, gathering information from a wide range of unstructured and structured sources should help companies build efficient, streamlined operations using digital apps and services. Going digital makes it easier to gather data from diverse locations, and having apps and services in place to leverage that information enables companies to make both real-time and strategic decisions with…

Performing an all-purpose IT audit can be a great way to kick off a partnership with a managed services provider. An audit will help you and the MSP understand how technology is currently impacting your business and identify potential strategies for improvement moving forward. A good MSP doesn't just sell you technology and support it, it will also serve as a consultant that helps you maximize value creation through IT innovation. An…

The data center without walls movement has taken hold in the enterprise, creating a situation in which organizations can freely mix and match diverse technology services to drive value creation. In particular, being able to subscribe to cloud technologies, colocation services and similar hosted data center solutions lets companies move to an operating cost model for many of their IT systems. The result is a situation in which raising large…

Telecommunications expense management tools offer organizations visibility into how they use and pay for a variety of communications technologies, something that is increasingly valuable as technological models shift across the telecom services sector. Historically, enterprise communications investments have boiled down to purchasing phones, fax machines, internet services and the various network services that support them - such as a direct line for fax machines. Over time, this model became more…

Enterprise culture is changing as many businesses work to establish startup-like collaboration and flexibility to fuel innovation and gain a competitive edge. Advanced communication tools have become critical as this cultural shift has gained momentum, and Microsoft Skype for Business has emerged as an easy-to-use solution for the modern enterprise. The longstanding collaboration problem Creating genuine team environments in which people actually work together on projects instead of simply taking…