In the past two decades, the field of enterprise communications has changed a lot, and it is not surprising that companies want to upgrade to the latest technology. Anyone who has studied modern enterprise communication systems may have heard of VoIP and Unified Communications [UC]. For laymen, these terms may seem interchangeable or confusing, but there are important differences in price, scope, and complexity between the two solutions.
price
Although this is not the biggest difference between VoIP and UC, it is usually the most important one for organizations. Although VoIP deployment can be the first step toward unified communications, implementing VoIP is much cheaper than UC. Companies that want to cut costs or those that already have a low margin are more likely to use VoIP because it saves a lot of money over traditional phone lines.
Implementing a comprehensive end-to-end unified communications solution typically requires more investment—finance, time, and manpower—and is therefore a viable alternative to large organizations or organizations that can prove their systems for the long term.
range
VoIP is simply Internet Protocol Voice. In general, it is what it says. Enterprises can route voice communications over fast Internet connections rather than through circuit switches. UC has a wider range of services including video conferencing, voice recognition, presence, email, voicemail, messaging, fax and VoIP. In most cases, the voice portion of unified communications is powered by VoIP.
However, many hosted VoIP providers offer additional services such as video conferencing, voicemail to email transcription, etc. as part of the basic VoIP service. This is often the root cause of enterprise confusion, but the difference between these plans and UC is that the latter contains many different applications that are developed/designed using a similar interface. Each different application can communicate seamlessly with each other. For end users, the experience of using one tool is no different than the experience of using another tool - whether for messaging or voice mail.
complex
Unified Communications solutions have many different components that must work together to provide a common interface to end users. It can be said that it has more moving parts. VoIP deployment is simpler and produces a positive ROI in a short period of time. UC projects can last for months or even years and may require multiple iterations to eliminate errors or personalization to meet the needs of the organization.
Orignal From: VoIP and UC - What is the difference?
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