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We often talk about how the cloud is growing bigger, more widely used, and more well known. Often times that’s viewed in the context of what it means for the cloud itself, but not so much the effect it has on other policies and services. Yet as cloud usage grows at an incredible rate, unified communications also benefits from its expansion.

Two years ago, less than 40 percent of organizations used the cloud, while more believed that outsourcing IT infrastructure was the wave of the future. Today, 85 percent of companies use cloud services for data analytics, storage, and hosted services and applications. As a result, there’s been a move to solutions and systems that support the cloud, which inevitably includes unified communications.

BYOD has seen an increase as a result of the cloud, due to the ability to access company data through the cloud from one’s mobile device. With cloud-based solutions, one’s no longer restricted to their work computer, allowing a greater freedom and the ability to use any device they want – usually their own. This has in turn improved unified communications, as it involves connecting through multiple devices and locations. After all, with unified communications, multiple devices can correspond with greater ease.

"A good example of this was Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert), which came up with a cloud UC offering that it thought would be a good offering for small-business customers," says Jim Burton, CEO of CT Link. "It actually was the big customers that gravitated to it early because they saw the cost benefit of having someone host UC, manage it for them and not have to worry about regular updates. It's ended up being such a big thing that this year, more than 40 percent of Interactive Intelligence's revenue will be based on the cloud for big business."

Of course, the cloud itself is a unified communications tool, but in this case, each are helping one another, in an almost symbiotic sort of way. The growth of one leads to improvements for another, which in turn strengthens the first. Cloud, UC, and BYOD are all intertwined, helping make businesses and people more connected than ever before.

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