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TELUS Business

Decoding the Unified Communications market in Canada

Tech Trends · Nov 22, 2019

The Unified Communications (UC) services market in Canada is burgeoning and now considered the cornerstone and foundation of modern business collaboration. UC represents an evolution of the maturing private branch exchange (PBX) market. Since the early days of the internet, organizations have been using PBXs over IP technology, but it’s only recently that technological advancements and wide-scale broadband availability have evolved the PBX from products to services.

Today, new cloud-based hosted PBX systems (HPBX) provide companies with unparalleled advanced phone services and collaboration capabilities. Services such as IM, presence, meet-me-rooms, conferencing, and seamless integration with software platforms like Salesforce can improve productivity and lower business costs.

For the foreseeable future, the vast majority of PBX systems will be purchased using cloud-based UC products offered by large telecom service providers. 


Decoding HPBX 

To offer HPBX services, telecom providers deploy platforms which are already compatible with their network, leveraging carrier-grade application servers to address client requirements.

With Hosted PBX, businesses can offload the responsibility of hardware and support to their service provider. From an organizational point of view, everything runs as usual, but companies no longer require on-site technical support resources. Not only does HPBX have no physical limits on the number of lines, adding more is effortless and can be accomplished without complicated or expensive equipment.

Working with a large service provider also allows organizations to scale systems with endless user capacities. Given this scalability, it’s no wonder that financial institutions and many government departments have made the switch to Hosted PBX services.

Calling features range from the basic (speed dial, call park, music-on-hold, voice mail) to the advanced (voicemail to email transfer and transcription, video calling, soft client, fixed-mobile integration, single number reach). Through the service provider, services and plans can be customizable and scalable to match the needs of customers.

Furthermore, the HPBX service provider handles the call connections over the Internet and stores and manages all of the PBX data. By backing up all relevant data, customers get the peace of mind that comes with this level of redundancy.


Canada’s growing UC market

In 2018, the Canadian market for hosted PBX and UC services expanded by an estimated 47.5% to $198.3 million, with TELUS as the top service provider by market share (34.6%). By the end of 2019, TELUS’ lead is expected to increase to 35.7%, with the next closest competitor at 22.9%.

TELUS’ success, despite a later entry into the market, is a result of efficiently accommodating clients within all sectors of the market — from small business to medium and large enterprise. 


TELUS offers three distinct solutions: 

In late 2018, TELUS made the decision to consolidate all IP/cloud-based voice and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) services under a single product umbrella: including UCaaS, HPBX, SIP trunking, cloud contact centre, Skype for Business, and a portfolio of cloud apps such as Google Suite, Cloud Fax and Office 365. With this consolidated product offering, TELUS is in a unique position to embrace a more holistic approach in developing, delivering and supporting UC solutions to business customers.

In addition, TELUS-owned geographically diverse data centres — offer resiliency, redundancy and provide a higher degree of control compared to rented space in third party data centres.


Why Unified Communication and Collaboration is so essential to business

Whether your have in-office workers, mobile employees or agents and customers – UC&C changes the way we interact. Businesses of all sizes can ensure that their teams find and communicate with the right people, share data seamlessly and securely, work more efficiently together.

Want to learn more about how a UC solution can help optimize your business?

View the on-demand webinar: Why switch from an on-premise PBX to the cloud

Read about how the Running Room accelerated business by moving to the cloud.

Authored by:
Nicole Hylmar
Nicole Hylmar