As more organizations become aware of the many benefits unified communications (UC) offers to improve their business processes, the adoption rate has been increasing. According to a report by Research and Markets, the overall UC market is forecast to reach $75.81 billion by 2020. And while on-premises systems currently make up more than 60 percent of the deployments, cloud-based solutions are gradually taking up more of the market share. This has driven service providers to increase their UC cloud offerings as is illustrated by the announcement that XO Communications has deployed an enhanced suite of hosted UC and mobile services powered by BroadSoft’s (News - Alert) UC-One platform to meet the growing demand.

This will give XO business customers more UC capabilities without having to make the initial investment required for premises-based deployments. BroadSoft currently has more than 10 million hosted and 750,000 mobile UC lines deployed globally, which gives it a proven platform that can be used by services providers to quickly increase their presence in the segment.

BroadSoft UC-One is designed to bring together voice, video, business directories, call logs, instant messaging and presence available on a single application so today’s mobile workforce can access these solutions no matter where they are. These services can easily be adopted by the company’s partners to work with their IT ecosystem and the products and services they offer.

With a single application, customers are able to access the range of UC services while using one identity across multiple devices, services and networks on Android (News - Alert), iOS, Mac and Windows platforms.

The changing environment in the workplace now requires collaboration and flexible working options. Unified communication makes this possible by seamlessly giving employees instant access to information they need to interact with colleagues, partners and customers.

The benefits BroadSoft UC-One delivers include the ability to:

• Connect, call, and collaborate with any phone, smart device, or laptop with presence that displays status, location and time zone, to choose the best way to communicate.
• Send and receive instant messages, or initiate a group chat to get answers quickly.
• Start or accept video calls on laptops, video-enabled phones, smartphones, and tablets for more effective face-to-face communications.
• Access business calling features for inbound and outbound calls with integrated business calling capabilities with a user experience delivered in a fully hosted environment, or connect with SIP Trunking to existing PBXs.
• Bring teams together with a multi-party voice and video collaboration with anyone from different locations using High Definition voice and video.
• Share project plans with the internal team, or work products, contracts, or other media with customers and partners with desktop sharing.

 “The BroadSoft platform and cloud architecture enables XO to offer a solid portfolio of telephony and UC solutions,” said Jake Heinz, senior vice president of marketing and product at XO Communications (News - Alert). “The BroadSoft platform enables us to satisfy customer needs with everything from SIP Trunking and Hosted PBX to UC services and mobility services.”

The ability to communicate with all of your available resource at your fingertips is key for today’s businesses. Whether it is getting in touch with different personnel at a moment’s notice or accessing an important email while you are having a video conference, UC makes this possible.