Top 5 UC Providers Helping During This Pandemic
A variety of UCaaS Vendors have stepped up to help businesses collaborate during the COVID-19 Pandemic. What started as a Trickle of businesses that included Zoom and Dialpad has become a wave of companies offering their collaboration and video conferences for free for the duration of this national emergency. Many believe this will create a fundamental shift in how we do business moving forward.
Let’s take a look at the vendors:
Dialpad
Dialpad (backed by Google Ventures) was the first company we covered that began extended pro feature to the free userbase. The biggest changes included removing the time cap (45 minutes is now 5 hours) and increasing the number of invitees from 10 to 50. Dialpad is also allowing businesses to leverage their DialpadTalk technology in the United States, Canada, and Japan.
Zoom
Zoom has been the media darling of this outbreak. Their stock has seen incredible gains over the last two weeks. Their product is incredible and their approach to helping businesses is just as good. Many companies have already started using the free versions of Zoom’s collaboration tools, but they’ve taken additional steps to help businesses during this time.
Vonage
Vonage just announced a multitude of free services to support “organizations that need to operate in remote environments during the COVID-19 health crisis.” These services are designed to help businesses with remote video collaboration products, new SMS services, and more. Vonage currently serves over 1.3 million businesses and consumers all over the globe.
Google Voice / Hangouts
Hangouts has had a variety of free and inexpensive options for years. Google has aligned their Google Suite (Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc.) and their voice products with small and medium businesses for some time. Right now, they plan on offering all “advanced” features through the summer including extensive meeting features and more. They are also supporting educational and healthcare organizations in unprecedented ways. Learn more here.
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft has had an interesting few years with Business Collaboration software. From Lync to Skype for Business and now Teams, the Redmond based juggernaut is now offering an extended free trial (6 months) for their Collaboration and Conferencing software. Worth noting, this trial also includes access to Office365, which may be an additional point of consideration for companies that need additional features for their remote workers.
Final Thoughts
It’s great to see so many providers offering their services during these difficult times. There are also a variety of other vendors offering services including Avaya, Mitel, and RingCentral. If your business is looking for ways to communicate and collaborate, feel free to reach out to us. We are happy to help and will get you transitioned to the cloud at no cost. We partner with every major provider and offer consultation at no cost to you.
