VoIP and UC – What’s the Difference?
The world of enterprise communication has changed a lot over the last two decades and it’s no surprise that businesses want to upgrade to the latest technology. Anyone who has done research on modern enterprise communication systems is likely to have heard of VoIP and Unified Communication (UC). To a layperson, the terms may appear interchangeable or confusing but both solutions have important differences in terms of price, scope and complexity.
Price
Though this is not the biggest differentiator between VoIP and UC, it is often the one that matters most to organizations. VoIP is considerably cheaper to implement than UC, although a VoIP deployment can be the first step towards unified communication. Businesses that are looking to cut costs or those that already operate on razor thin margins are more likely to prefer VoIP since it offers considerable savings over traditional phone lines.
Implementing a comprehensive, end-to-end unified communication solution usually requires more investment – money, time and manpower – so it is a viable alternative for larger organizations or those that can afford to future proof their system for the long-term.
Scope
VoIP is quite simply Voice over Internet Protocol and generally, it does what it says. Businesses are able to route their voice communication over fast Internet connections instead of through circuit switches. UC has a much wider scope and includes video conferencing, speech recognition, presence, email, voicemail, messaging, fax as well as VoIP. In most cases, the voice part of unified communication is powered through VoIP.
However many hosted VoIP vendors also offer additional services such as video conferencing, voicemail to email transcription etc. as part of the basic VoIP service. This is often the source of confusion for businesses but the difference between these plans and UC is that the latter comprises many different apps that are developed/designed with similar interfaces. Each different application can communicate seamlessly with one another. To the end-user, the experience of using one tool is not different from using another – whether it is for messaging or voicemail.
Complexity
Unified communication solutions have many different components that have to work together to present a common interface for the end-user. It has more moving parts so to speak. VoIP is simpler to deploy and generates positive ROI within a short period of time. UC projects can span months or even years and it can take several iterations to eliminate bugs or personalize the deployment suit the needs of the organization.