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Shining a light on Hosted Voice for the future of remote and flexible working

By Jaipriya Kaur Rai

Voice Propositions Specialist at BT Wholesale

Earlier this month, we ran a business seminar with Comms Business, looking at Hosted Voice and the role it is playing during coronavirus.

 

We showed how crucial it has become for helping businesses throughout the UK to make their remote working efficient and effective.

 

The UK cloud communication market has boomed over the last few years, as more and more people move to the cloud from on-premises equipment. (It grew by 800,586 users over 2019 - a rate of 20.14%).

 

Dramatic digital transformation

Coronavirus has dramatically speeded up the change. Microsoft has reported 2 years’ worth of digital transformation in just 2 months. Overall, the pandemic is prompting more businesses to prepare for an all-IP migration ahead of the PSTN switch-off in 2025.

For our part, we got thousands of homeworkers up and running in less than 5 days, and connected brand-new hospitals in under a week.

 

Openreach is reporting an average increase of +25% usage across its networks in the UK between February and April. This is made up of business workers working from home and domestic usage e.g.Netflix. Interestingly enough, evening traffic hasn’t increased much - the concentration is mostly daytime.

 

Coronavirus boosts demand for remote working

Coronavirus has broken the dam of remote working. Compared to last year, our channel partners have seen more than a 40% increase in new business enquiries, translating into 29% in new business wins. This is due to a massive increase in people moving to the cloud and wanting to take cloud services.

 

Demand for hosted services has been steady rather than dramatic since lockdown. (We expected this, as 94% of our customers were already set up top work from home).

 

With people working remotely, demand is switching from headsets to softphones. Our channel partners can seize opportunities in this area by being there to help customers deliver and integrate solutions.

 

Collaboration brings opportunities for our channel partners

Collaboration is the future, as of now. Businesses are crying out for tools and unified communications systems that make collaboration easy. Hosted voice is important, but our channel partners need to look beyond voice and make sure that video and messaging are in the portfolio too. We’ve been collaborating with our partners, to guarantee that what we offer will help customers achieve success.

 

Wholesale Hosted Communications - reliable, scalable, adaptable

The result of our collaboration is Wholesale Hosted Communications, our new white-label Unified Communications service. Customers can tailor it to their needs. It can deliver Hosted Centrex or Hosted SIP Trunking service, all from our simple provisioning portal.

 

This is a combined service for the perfect UC Solution, and is reliable and scalable. Our services run on our highly resilient next-generation network with robust Service Level Agreements in place, so that partners can grow their business with confidence. We’re constantly evaluating the portfolio to adapt to changes in the market - and we’re adding new enhancements and developments all the time.

 

The coronavirus has impacted all areas of life. But we need to take up the challenge and work with our partners to deliver the best services possible. For more information on our coronavirus response Hosted Voice support packages, please visit btwholesale.com/remote-working .

 

All statistics are from Dominic Black, Research Director at Cavell, who co-presented the webinar.

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