On-Premises and Hybrid UC Benefits for Education, Hospitality, and Retail

On-prem, private hosted, and hybrid Unified Communications (UC) platforms offer unique advantages for education, hospitality, and retail organizations. Among participating companies in those industries in Metrigy’s Workplace Collaboration: 2023-24 global research study, almost 32% use on-premises UC platforms, while 24.7% use a private cloud solution.

Looking at each segment individually, 64.7% of those in the hospitality industry are on-premises or private-hosted, compared to 56.7% of education and 50% of retail. Across geographies, North America has the highest adoption of on-premises platforms, followed by Australia and the EU. Just 13% of those who are currently on-premises plan to move to Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) in 2023.

These high adoption rates of on-premises and private hosted UC platforms, coupled with the relatively small percentage of those planning to move to UCaaS, highlight significant benefits for the on-premises, private-hosted, and hybrid models for education, hospitality, and retail industries.

4 Reasons Why Education, Hospitality, and Retail Stick with On-Prem and Hybrid UC

1. Reliability

The primary reason cited across all three industries for staying with on-premises and private-hosted solutions is their reliability. In the retail space, with large numbers of distributed locations, stores must be able to operate even if there is a network outage. Individual locations must be able to place and receive calls and ensure that systems such as alarms can always function. Hospitality operates under a similar model. A hotel, for example, can’t tolerate downtime for its in-room communications or be unreachable by those looking to make a reservation if there is a network outage or a UCaaS outage. Educational organizations, too, must ensure reliability, especially for higher education institutions spread out across campuses, and support communications modalities, including emergency calling systems.

Continue reading at mitel.com.

Author(s)

Irwin Lazar

President and Principal Analyst