As Lee Wise begins to tell the story of Unified Communications – and the significance it holds in business communications’ future – he first takes us back to the past. March 2020 to be exact. 

The pandemic shutdown in Dallas was shocking. Lee remembers driving into the Coppell office from his home in The Colony, spanning 17 miles on Sam Rayburn Tollway, and seeing maybe two dozen cars along the way, office parking lots completely bare of vehicles. He remembers thinking… “how do you keep business running when you can’t get to the office?”

One way to answer the question Lee poses? Unified Communications.

“When I’m talking to customers, I certainly show them the features… the online meeting tab, the chat, the file collaboration, the cloud-based phone, and mobile capabilities, etc. But I also talk about this… when the next snowpocalypse happens, or the next pandemic happens, (OR you want to enable a remote workforce), how do you keep business running when you can’t get to the office?” Lee said.

What is Unified Communications?

Unified Communications (UC) is an umbrella term for the integration of multiple enterprise communication tools -- such as voice calling, video conferencing, instant messaging (IM), presence, content sharing, etc. -- into a single, streamlined interface, and perhaps more relevant for this story, a platform that travels with its users.

What does Unified Communications mean for its users?

Lee’s Datamax role as an IT Sales Manager serves as a perfect example.

50 percent of Lee’s time at work is spent traveling to various offices. Within any two or three-week window, he can be in Dallas, Hot Springs, Little Rock, Tyler, and back to Dallas. He doesn’t have four phones for four different offices. With UC, he has his business phone with him wherever he goes, a la smartphone.

“The world of the business person 20 years ago, I had to have a company cell phone that was different from my standard business phone. Now when someone calls my line, it pings directly to my cell phone wherever I am, so I can conduct business as usual as if I’m sitting at my desk.”

Not only that. Via the Elevate UC app, Lee can share files, chat, and take a phone call interchangeably from his desktop, his laptop, his smartphone, etc. He can pull up a video conference meeting with a few clicks to visit with a Tyler rep while he’s in Hot Springs.

These features are advantageous without a doubt, but his biggest talking point to potential clients when it comes to UC remains business continuity.

“Take the Cisco phones we have on our desks right now. If we lose power, sure the phone powers off and you can’t use it. But if we lose Internet, the phone system is down as well because everything is on Premise,” Lee said. “With a cloud solution like Elevate, let’s say the power goes out and we lose our desktop phones. But the phone SYSTEM is still up and running, I can utilize that system from my cell phone, or take my laptop home, and as long as I have an Internet connection, I’m still up and running.

What does Unified Communications mean for users here?

Internal IT Administrator Jay Wise puts it like this: “Once the new phone system is up, I think people won’t realize they are using anything different, with the only difference being they’ve got all the call information they need available on their desktop. And there’s so many new features right in front of them.”

Want to see if someone’s available? It’s right there in front of you. Not sure of a person’s extension? A quick search will deliver a contact within a click or two, all on your computer screen.

Jay and other project team members are already actively working behind the scenes to prepare users to use the UC platform. Jay can install the Elevate desktop app onto users’ devices from his Dallas/Fort Worth desk. He’s also checking each extension and direct phone number to make sure that what’s currently on a Cisco Phone will match with the new Elevate phone.

“At that point, it will come down to going office to office, group by group, setting a phone on somebody’s desk and moving over to the cloud system,” Jay said. “These new phones aren’t like Cisco phones, which have to be plugged into our switches. These phones are wireless. So once they’re on users’ desks, they’re set up and they’re ready to go.”

More importantly, Jay stresses, once live, the collaborative features, the chat, the accessibility through the mobile app, etc... all these features will become a boon to someone’s productivity (and a lot easier to access).

“I think once everybody gets used to it, they will be excited about how easy Elevate is to use, and how it will empower different departments to communicate easier. Service people, for example, don’t always have a desk phone in front of them. But with Elevate, they will be able to use chat to communicate with other folks around the organization. People don’t have to open up an email or even pick up the phone… They can chat, hop on a video conference, or make a call from their desktop. If anything, I think it will serve to bring our company closer together.”