VoIP versus UCaaS: The Ultimate Breakdown

Modern businesses require modern solutions. That’s why companies these days search high and low to find the perfect service to fit their needs. If you’re one of these organisations, you’ve indubitably come across different terms like VoIP and UCaaS; both are praised for their high-benefit, low-cost nature.

So how do you make the choice? Considering the scale of investment, there are many important points to consider before making a switch.

A Deloitte survey reported that nearly 90% of executives and managers plan to embrace digitisation within their organisation to avoid disruptions. While this is one of the most important decisions a business has to make, it is also easily one of the most contested debates within the broader communication tools space.

VoIP or UCaaS? The industry has been divided over them since their conception. 

It’s important to note that UCaaS and VoIP aren’t really competitors or replacements of each other. In fact, they complement each other in terms of functionality and features. UCaaS builds on a lot of VoIP features as a platform. These are two separate products with unique user bases according to their specific strengths.

However, before we delve deeper into this debate, let’s gain a better understanding of both these terms.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)

Throw away all your complicated notions. VoIP is simply a digital communications medium that enables voice calls over the Internet. The broader idea here is that you can communicate via the cloud instead of using traditional means like analogue telephone lines. 

Without taking away from any of the capabilities of traditional systems, this service adds to it and offers a holistic all-in-one solution. You can continue using your wired desk phones, or you can switch to your smartphone. No hassle. 

Benefits of using VoIP –

VoIP was declared the fastest-growing technology of the decade in 2011, beating major entrants like search engines, online shopping, and even online dating. This is because of the wide range of efficiency gains it brings to organisations.

Employees can send and receive voicemail messages, monitor and keep a track of interactions via caller ID, or forward calls to alternate numbers and lines when needed.

Besides, many other features like call holding, auto-attendants, call logs, monitoring, recording, and more, increase business efficiency.

VoIP phone service helps organisations avail substantial cost savings on voice communications. More importantly, it is a mature technology that is reliable, simple, and well-developed with low risks.

Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)

UCaaS stands for quite literally what its naming scheme suggests—it provides for unified communications services. What does that mean? It is an enterprise-grade communications platform which integrates all the different means and methods of communication that an organisation could possibly need. 

Hence, be it productivity software like slack, or texting, or video calls, or any other ways of communicating really—UCaaS has it all for you to use within a single service!

Benefits of using UCaaS –

Since UCaaS is a cloud-based service, it brings a whole host of efficiency and cost gains in and of itself. For example, the service provider offers round-the-clock technical support for resolving all issues. 

Another aspect of using parallel mediums of communication is that they’re all decentralised and fragmented. An organisation would struggle to observe, control, collect, and analyse all the data generated into one base, if not for a comprehensive tool like UCaaS. 

This solution offers the perfect set up to integrate the communication mediums via a cloud platform and opens up a number of possibilities. 

UCaaS vs VoIP: How do businesses make a choice?

Each of the two solutions has a distinct set of features suitable for specific businesses. The size of your enterprise and the nature of your work and team depend greatly on the quality of service delivered. 

Let’s look at four key questions an organisation should consider before finalising a service.

• Does your business involve a lot of collaboration? 

Businesses, regardless of size and industry, often involve a large group of people working towards an organised, shared set of goals. That needs, apart from frequent communication, a lot of collaboration as well.

This is another area where UCaaS shines through. The fact that UCaaS is a cloud-based platform which provides for integrated communication services allows for complex and rather efficient collaboration spaces as well!

Plus, there is the added benefit of employees being able to manage the workflow remotely from wherever they are. Moreover, sharing and accessing data is just as seamless owing to the cloud-first nature of the service platform.

You can even integrate productivity management apps, calendars, CRMs, instant messaging, video chats and more within the platform itself in order to make the best use of all your tools. This all-in-one cloud-based platform is a productive solution for business.

• Does your business need video as a corporate communications tool?

Ask yourself this: do the day-to-day activities of your staff require constant meetings, chats and video presentations? Even if the answer was debatable at some point, the current reality of COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated video as the new corporate communications tool. And to address all these newfound needs, UCaaS is the way to go.

A lot of the communication we do at work is non-verbal, which means video ensures far fewer instances of miscommunication. Organisations also leverage this feature to reduce their business travel costs, connect better with clients, conduct meetings, perform a range of troubleshooting, and so on.

• Is your business just starting off and has minimal needs at the moment?

Some budding businesses have a strong need for voice communications with their clients. They also require top-notch business response teams, with reliable call centre setups for their support department.

If your business falls under this category, VoIP systems can serve your needs perfectly. 

In fact, these days, advanced VoIP solutions offer numerous features like adding or removing phone lines, offering detailed analytic reports, CRM integration, employee-specific feature sets enablement and so on!

• Does your business deal with a lot of data?

Businesses of all sizes and sectors these days have come to rely on data generation and analysis for a large variety of purposes. However, consumer sensitivity about how their personal data is stored and handled has heightened owing to many incidents of data breaches in recent months. 

This makes it imperative that your organisation stores and processes data in a manner which is safe, asset-light and secure. UCaaS ticks all those boxes and more.

Owing to its cloud-only nature, UCaaS allows for frequent backups of data, virtual access, seamless sharing and more. All of this while helping ensure top grade data security protocols built into the service platform itself.

The Verdict

The wave of digitisation has swept across organisations around the world, now at ten times the pace due to the pandemic. The question facing businesses is no more ‘if’ digitisation, but ‘when’ and in ‘what form’.

Back in 2017, Forbes had predicted that 80% of entire IT budgets of businesses would be spent on cloud-technology and cloud-based solutions in the near future. In hindsight, that seems to be an understatement.

As mentioned earlier, UCaaS and VoIP are complementary technologies. It isn’t too far-fetched to assume that with changing needs, you might switch from one to another someday. 

Acefone provides sustainable, cost-effective advanced UCaaS solutions that’ll increase your business productivity and boost brand recognition. Contact our sales team at 0800-084-3663 for further information.

Olivia Trott

Olivia is an outgoing person who enjoys writing, is an SEO enthusiast, and often interacts with others in intellectual conversations. She enjoys listening to music in her free time. Connect with her on Linkedin