At a time when the world is coming together to fight Covid-19, companies across different industries need to find ways to continue delivering their products and services in order to survive these challenging times. At the same time, most companies have to operate under difficult conditions, where a significant part of the workforce is forced to work from home, with virtually no access to their company offices. The world has now become a global virtual office, and connections must continue to be established despite the distance between colleagues, customers, and key stakeholders.
As a result, we are seeing a significant number of employees working remotely. Fortunately, several solutions already exist to facilitate remote work, and the current priority is to make them increasingly accessible and user-friendly for the global community. Moreover, these technologies must be designed in a way that minimizes the need for on-site maintenance, as a local support approach is not only more time-consuming and expensive but also unacceptable in situations like the one we are currently experiencing.
Depending on business requirements, the need to ensure communication continuity ranges from corporate telephony to full collaboration platforms that enable interaction between internal and external stakeholders. As mentioned above, solutions already exist and are relatively easy to deploy.
Regarding telephony, remote work solutions are available through a combination of IP softphones that emulate office phones, software installed on personal computers, and necessary VPNs that ensure secure remote connections. Combined with a rich set of features, these technologies make homes highly effective workplaces for employees. This also applies to customer service, as employees can continue interacting with clients using such solutions without the need for everyone to be physically present in one location.
During crises such as Covid-19, the most important thing for organizations is to maintain team spirit and support effective teamwork regardless of distance. This requires efficient collaboration tools that ensure communication continuity and business resilience. While earlier generations of solutions were limited to internal business environments, Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) technologies break all boundaries, allowing teams to work directly from the cloud. As a result, they eliminate the burden of complex on-premises installations, which become particularly challenging in difficult times.
Recently, ALE faced a customer challenge where no cloud-based UCaaS solution had previously been considered. The customer needed to deploy ALE Rainbow for 100 employees in less than four hours. The result was that all users were active and fully operational in under two hours. In addition to restoring all internal and external communication channels, the Rainbow deployment expanded the customer’s capabilities toward more digital services, enabling a rethinking of how people work and communicate under challenging conditions.
Due to Covid-19, most vendors provided temporary free access to their resources during the quarantine period. ALE was no exception and offered 90 days of free access. Businesses now had the opportunity to set up remote work and test the solution completely free of charge.
During the first three weeks of March 2020, ALE delivered more IP Desktop Softphone licenses than it typically does in a year. In the same period, nearly 300 companies of various sizes implemented borderless collaboration capabilities via Rainbow for more than 50,000 employees. Moreover, demand continues to grow day by day. The key difference between Rainbow and other cloud systems is that there is no need to purchase licenses for all employees; it is sufficient to buy and distribute a small number of licenses among team leaders, who then create and manage working groups. Participants in these groups do not require licenses.
Although we do not know what the future holds, we do know that the way we work will change. We expect demand for remote work and cloud collaboration solutions to continue growing even after the crisis ends. What the world is experiencing now will accelerate the transformation of corporate communications and push companies more rapidly into the digital era, where present (existing IP infrastructure) and future (cloud technologies) converge.