Adopting Unified Communications (UC) in the cloud requires a roadmap to guide everybody to the ultimate destination.

After implementing UC solutions for companies large and small in every industry, CBTS has learned that a UC roadmap must be boiled down to three foundational elements: technology, processes, and people.

Here’s a concise look at all three:

1. Technology

Complete a thorough technology audit

The technology component of your UC roadmap starts with a thorough audit of all the devices you use today.

Even if you’re replacing obsolete gear, you need to document each item and the work it does to avoid neglecting vital processes. Make sure you document the location of each device, create an inventory, and establish priorities for the hardware that require the most attention and resources.

Check out “3 steps to preparing for cloud communications” to learn more.

Things to address in technology audit

Your technology audit also needs to address:

1. All the services, features, and functionalities people use including who uses them, how often they use them, and why they use them.
2. Applications and productivity suites people use every day—especially the ones that plug gaps in existing systems.
3. How people collaborate now and any hurdles to effective collaboration.
4. Non-approved apps and devices people use.

Make sure to document and assess the power and capacity of your underlying network. Adding UC features can require more bandwidth. Scrimping at the network level can degrade the user experience for everybody.

Consider migrating to UC in phases so you can iron out as many wrinkles as possible before going live with your entire customer base.

2. Processes

Your UC roadmap must document how people communicate and collaborate with current technology and establish processes to elevate these experiences with UC tools.

Current processes

You may find these processes evolved in an ad-hoc fashion that barely makes sense. However, they have an underlying logic tied to a specific business need.

Carefully map and document processes like:

• Handling of inbound customer calls across multiple scenarios. For instance, how do calls vary at different times of day, and how do you handle calls if a service rep is unavailable?
• Teams’ methodologies for sharing information, collaborating, and managing projects both internally and with external partners and suppliers.

Future processes

Start digging deep into the high-powered features of UC.

You’ll want to consider:

• The effects of new capabilities. How new capabilities like instant messaging and screen-sharing improve collaboration between customer service and back-office teams, speeding their responses to customer questions.
• How to use the cloud to remove geographic hurdles in your call-handling processes. For instance, you can configure UC to route calls to multiple locations to make sure all customers get through to a service representative.
• Call volumes. How to analyze call volumes to help determine staffing needs for call centers.

3. People

The people portion of your UC roadmap should include:

Stakeholder buy-in

Get stakeholder buy-in from the executive suite and top managers. When the senior leadership shows a strong commitment to the transition, it’s easier for everybody else to adapt.

Streamlining communication

Figure out how people communicate now and map out how you’ll improve things in the new UC system.

Training

Provide formal training that’s relevant to the work people do. Customer service representatives need to understand UC intricacies that elevate the customer experience, while the staff in the warehouse might need to know only the basics of voice services.

Make sure your UCaaS provider offers white glove installs to accommodate this level of training. Your customer’s experience will depend on how well your employees know the system.

Thorough documentation

Create thorough documentation of the installation and access to training materials people can reference after the migration. These documents need to be easy to understand and should provide concise, step-by-step guidance.

Thorough work practices and policy documentation

Document changes to people’s work practices. Your staff can have always-on access via their smartphones, laptops, and home PCs. Moreover, they’ll be accessible in any location at any time. You should also consider formulating policies to help people maintain work-life balance.

Employee support

Ask about support for your employees, and make sure your UCaaS provider has the necessary resources to help educate employees starting Day 1.

Vendor, supplier, and partners consultations

Consult with vendors, suppliers, and partners. Many UC features can be configured to communicate with other companies’ UC systems.

Finally, never forget the impact on the people who matter most: the ones purchasing your goods and services. If your new system requires customers to adjust their habits and practices, you need to make the transition as painless as possible.

The right partner for your UCaaS journey

CBTS has the skills, experience, and commitment to create the cloud-based UC solution that fits your people and your marketplace. We cover all phases of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) transitions, from design to implementation to 24/7/365 monitoring, management, and support.

Download our free eGuide to start your journey today.

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You see the potential of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) to transform your business. A single cloud-based platform for voice, video, and text communications enables all of your people to connect on any Internet-connected device at any time, in any location. The same applies to collaborations with your vendors and suppliers.

Whether you have a legacy PBX system or an on-premises UC platform, you need a comprehensive plan to migrate your communications to the cloud. It’s an intricate process with dozens of interrelated parts that must be configured to work in unison.

Indeed, the complexity of the transition creates a strong argument for partnering with a UCaaS provider to coordinate the move and manage all the new technology after implementation.

Three key steps to UCaaS explained

Planning your move starts with three principal stages: A system audit, an assessment of investment opportunities, and business preparations. Here’s a quick look at all three:

Stage 1: Audit your current communications system

It’s critical to avoid disruptions when your new system goes live. Therefore, you must document every current feature, application, device, and hardware component. The audit looks for things including:

• Phone lines and extensions
• Contact information
• CRM system integration
• High-demand services that people use every day
• Low-demand services that you might not have to migrate
• Employees’ mobile devices and numbers
• User profiles, including permissions and log-in credentials

Be sure to review the location of every piece of equipment. You need an accurate inventory of what you have and where you have it.

Your audit will vary widely depending on the type of migration. If you’re transitioning from an antiquated PBX system, your audit could be a reasonably simple assessment of current hardware and services.

If, however, you’re migrating to an enterprise UC system to the cloud, you’ll have to ensure that a vast assortment of services, software, and devices dovetail successfully. That’s a much bigger job that typically requires the services of an experienced UCaaS provider like CBTS.

Stage 2: Identify investment opportunities

UCaaS presents a wealth of choices that you must assess carefully to identify the most lucrative opportunities. Popular UC services include:

• Video conferencing. Video can unlock limitless collaboration and customer service opportunities for your organization.
• Collaboration tools. App-centric services that allow teams to meet, message, call, whiteboard, and share.
• Contact center. If your current customer support system is overwhelmed, you may need advanced contact center features to help more customers and ease the strain on your staff.
• Presence capability. If you need to know the physical location of staff members, then presence capability can enable it.
• Every device is a network endpoint that generates data. Every app provides further insights. Software to visualize all these data sources can help you figure out who is generating the most sales and which support calls leave customers the most satisfied, for instance.

You may feel like a kid in a candy store if you’re new to UC. It’s important to understand that each app, feature, and device has pros and cons; you must establish priorities for the services that seem most promising. Perform a cost-benefit analysis of different features.

Stage 3: Prepare your business

Launching a new phone system can generate chaos across your business. You don’t want your executives fumbling through new features in front of prospective clients. And, of course, you want the transition to be invisible to customers. Keep the following in mind:

1. A cloud migration is the ideal time to replace or refresh equipment that’s been online a few years.
2. A phased implementation can help work out the bugs with a minimum of risk. Start with departments or divisions where downtime and confusion have less serious consequences.
3. Test your system thoroughly in advance and try to replicate the migration process as closely as possible.
4. Get early stakeholder buy in. If executives and supervisors start preparing their team early for the transition, there should be less confusion and chaos when the transition day arrives.
5. Thoroughly train all employees. The more people know about the system before it goes live, the fewer problems you’ll have.
6. Provide thorough documentation. When processes and techniques are written down, there’s less risk of problems ensuing because a crucial person is on vacation or has left the company.
7. Inform vendors and suppliers. Take time to determine how you can integrate your UC system with their systems.

Your migration will have iterations. You can’t anticipate every problem or please every customer during the transition. But careful planning and preparation can anticipate and eliminate most problems.

With UCaaS, you’ll never go it alone

Running UC in the cloud requires in-depth training, experience, and certifications across a broad range of technologies and disciplines. That’s more trouble than a lot of companies want to embrace.

These complications underscore the appeal of UCaaS from CBTS: Our experts decode all the details and make everything assimilate so your employees, customers, partners, and vendors enjoy seamless digital communications. And it doesn’t end at implementation—CBTS stays with you every step of the way through management, maintenance, and 24x7x365 support.

Download our free eGuide to start your journey today.

Every organization wants the advantages of unified communications (UC) technologies like video conferencing, team chatting, advanced analytics, and custom calling.

Perhaps it’s a one-woman consultancy conducting real-time conferences with clients on another continent. Or, maybe it’s a 25-seat tech startup using a rich suite of cloud-computing apps and tools. Then again, it could be a 200-employee software company integrating sophisticated call-center technology with an advanced CRM platform.

Small and midsized organizations can use UC technologies to elevate customer service and collaborate with vendors in far-flung locales. They can ensure all their employees have always-on connectivity to data and documents that help them succeed. They can give salespeople immediate access to rich customer data that help them call more prospects and land more contracts.

It all sounds fine on paper, but there’s a hitch: Most small- to mid-sized organizations don’t have the resources to corral all these technologies and fine-tune them for optimum performance. And that’s why so many partners with experts like those at CBTS, who have decades of experience configuring and managing high-end communications systems for companies of every size, in every industry.

Partnering with a UC expert has three fundamental benefits:

1. Saving money

UC systems must be designed, purchased, installed, and tested. Servers, switches, phones, mobile apps, PCs, tablets, and other components must be carefully coordinated and customized to meet a company’s precise business needs. Then, somebody needs to monitor, manage, and update the system.

For years, these hurdles discouraged smaller organizations from investing in UC technologies. They simply couldn’t afford the time, payroll, and equipment costs. Moreover, they did not want to deal with the distraction from their core business goals.

The advent of cloud technologies shifted this paradigm. Today, managed services experts like those at CBTS can deliver all these capabilities to just about any organization — all for a predictable monthly fee. CBTS partners gain access to best-in-class technologies and pay only for the resources they use. The CBTS advanced team of certified experts handle all the hardware, software, and security patches.

2. Scaling to meet business growth

A traditional PBX and phone network requires companies to purchase additional handsets, servers, and bandwidth capacity when their business grows. But if economy contractions or marketplace changes make these tools redundant, companies get stuck with plenty of old equipment that nobody wants.

Seasonal businesses like retailers that land most of their sales around the winter holidays might have to buy enough technology to handle their busiest shopping days, then let all those tools collect dust the rest of the year.

With UC hosted in the cloud and managed by a third-party provider, companies can scale up or down quickly, limit their costs to actual usage, and stop worrying about technology becoming obsolete the day they install it. And they can leave the intricate technical details to experts who can quickly adapt a company’s technology to its current needs.

3. Making better use of your people’s time

If you’re unfamiliar with a technology, you can tie up hours, days, and weeks tweaking settings and patching software—and still end up with subpar performance. By contrast, certified, well-trained technology experts can fix problems and improve outcomes quickly because they’ve solved the same issues a dozen times before.

The complexity of UC technologies requires people with years of experience and a passion for squeezing maximum performance out of hardware and software. The question is whether your business can afford to devote time and payroll to areas outside your core mission.

For smaller organizations with limited resources, it makes much more sense to keep your employees focused on your biggest business challenges and to leave the technical work to UC experts who can optimize performance at a lower cost.

Case study: CBTS helps distiller focus on growth

A Northern Kentucky distillery is tapping into the region’s boom in bourbon tourism. The startup has two dozen employees and is growing quickly after three years in business. CBTS delivers a fully hosted UC solution that helps the company stay focused on communicating with its core audience of bourbon sippers.
Read the New Riff Distillery case study here.

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Your voice solution is a mission-critical technology that keeps your organization running smoothly. It keeps your team working together efficiently, allows you to manage customer interactions quickly, and plays a vital role in nearly every aspect of your daily operations.

But the trouble with legacy voice technology is that costs start to accumulate as the equipment ages.
The costs go beyond outlays for new gear and service calls. Here are four ways your outdated voice solution is costing you:

(more…)

CBTS is proud to team with VMware to offer the VMware NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud solution. In December 2017 VMware acquired VeloCloud, which is the leader in cloud-delivered SD-WAN that enables enterprises and service providers to deploy flexible, secure WAN connectivity.

VeloCloud, now part of VMware, is showcasing its partnership with CBTS through a series of blogs that demonstrate how NSX SD-WAN is helping clients across the country deliver on strategic initiatives.

For example, CBTS leveraged the NSX SD-WAN solution to transform a healthcare network that operates 25 imaging centers across seven states, and that supports hundreds of medical offices and doctors across the United States.

The story demonstrates the powerful combination of the CBTS North American reach – which includes 20 offices, access to 50 data centers, and more than 1,500 employees – and NSX SD-WAN connectivity.

“CBTS takes a proactive approach to partnerships. Its long-standing relationship with VMware, coupled with its engineering expertise make us very optimistic for what we can accomplish together as we accelerate business outcomes through technology innovation,” said Sanjay Uppal, Vice President and General Manager, VeloCloud Business Unit, VMware.

“At CBTS, we are hyper-focused on the growth of SD-WAN and delivering exceptional service to our customers,” said Justin Rice, CBTS Director for NaaS and SD-WAN. “We have longstanding relationships with both VMware and VeloCloud, and believe this acquisition will allow us to scale to meet market demands while providing next-generation cloud networking services.”

To learn more about how CBTS helps clients leverage cloud-delivered SD-WAN, please visit this link. To read additional CBTS case studies that highlight the NSX SD-WAN connectivity solution in the healthcare and financial industries, please click here and here.

Government confronts many of the same challenges as the private sector, but also faces budget constraints that limit its ability to adopt new technologies and develop a workforce necessary for digital transformation.

While governments at all levels are working to attract and retain top talent, including Millennials, they are also looking to technology partners to collaborate and fill human resource gaps.

Tim Lonsway, Regional Director at CBTS, engages with governments across the country at the regional, state, and federal level and has seen a definite shift in how governments are deploying technology and changing workflows and structures in order to attract talent and maximize internal resources.

What are some of the limitations governments face when filling roles that support their IT initiatives?

Younger people don’t always seek the public sector out. I’m on a few committees where that’s an active topic. How do we attract younger people?  How do we get these younger people engaged in government, to care about government, to feel like they’ve got a valuable career in government? Government is spending energy on that issue and is taking action.

How do governments look at technology partners to address workforce challenges?

They are really focused on getting out of the technology business – the infrastructure technology:  compute, storage, network, security, firewall, things of that nature – and focusing more on the applications that serve constituents. You allow other people to do those things, so you can focus on initiatives that make more sense and that will attract the younger workforce.

Governments want to make the infrastructure newer, lighter, more modern, and leverage mobile technologies – the ability to work off a laptop, tablet, or smartphone – those types of things. You couldn’t do that 10 years ago. But today, people need the ability to work from different places and not have to work from a centralized location every day. The infrastructure needs to support that.

Are you seeing some rationalization of technology across departments and more unity?

Yes. For example, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is proud of its ability to service constituents. Seventy-five percent of its interactions with constituents are done either through a web portal, or through a chat interface. Constituents don’t necessarily have to pick up the phone to talk to somebody. They’re being serviced through the technology. With that technology, that infrastructure then becomes kind of that binding space, and that common interface. That “common user experience” is a term you hear a lot.

So, whether you’re on your mobile phone, laptop, or desktop, or whether you’re talking to Rehabilitation and Corrections, or Child and Family Services, or Taxation … whoever you’re talking to, they’re really driving you toward that common interface.

If you look just at the trends, the current RFPs in many states, it’s all about, “Let’s get this common front end. We’ll leverage these APIs on the back end, and make all of this stuff tick, and tie together.”

What are governments looking for from their IT partners like CBTS?

If I’m a government and my partner comes to me and says, “Oh, I hear what you’re saying. Let’s create a statement of work, and I’m going to need a PO before we get started,” that’s not the kind of partner I need. I need somebody that’s in it with me, that bleeds with me, that succeeds with me, that drives toward success with me.

That’s what differentiates CBTS in general from a lot of other service providers or partners. We become an extension of their organization, of their IT staff. We’re in there with them. We’re supporting them. We’re jumping right in.

Read how CBTS helped the State of Ohio leverage a Hosted Enterprise Unified Communications solution.

It wasn’t long ago that your C-suite of higher education CIOs didn’t have to worry about trends like Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD). But the advent of BYOD is one of the many challenges education IT leaders face as the mounting demands of mobile computing make transitioning to new IT operating models critical.

We recently asked Brent Flaugher, Senior Account Manager with CBTS, to describe these challenges and how CBTS products and services are helping make that transition easier.

Higher education CIOs are increasingly focused on delivering value-added initiatives and strategies.  What is driving this transition?

The constant 24/7 need for connectivity is a critical underlying factor driving this transition. This need increasingly makes the legacy methods of information delivery – platforms, network structure, and means of content delivery – unable to provide the quality that users expect and demand for a first-class 21^st century education.

What are the main challenges that higher education CIOs face as they transition from their legacy role of “keeping the lights on?”

Higher education CIOs are expected to do more with less. This can represent a monumental challenge as they contend with the increasing bandwidth demands of ever-more sophisticated multimedia-based educational content, which in turn requires better network optimization.  Coupled with these demands is the proliferation of mobile student-owned BYOD that replace the past model of school-provided devices.

BYOD introduces another level of security challenges. And as the number of these devices expands, so do bandwidth requirements – adding more pressure to the capacity of their existing networks.

The traditional model of educational IT ownership is changing. Tell us how forward-thinking CIOs are leading this change?

These CIOs are opting to transition to cloud-based services where they can rely on the deep expertise of IT professionals who can manage and grow their networks to support agile mobile offerings that are in such demand in the educational sector.

How do CBTS products and solutions meet the BYOD demand?

We constantly hear from our clients in the education sector that they are hungry for products that can increase their bandwidth and offer them a more robust and dependable wireless technology. But it is an inconvenient truth that implementing their value-added and data-loaded initiatives comes with a hefty trade-off.  With more data access comes more data center requirements. Additionally, CIOs are faced with the prospect of providing vast amounts of storage to accommodate all of this access and hiring expert staff to support these initiatives.

The CBTS focus is to meet these wishes by offering shared cloud-based offerings that can make wish-lists a reality. We do this by optimizing their storage, backup, voice, and security requirements. It’s not just a smart strategy for delivering a top-of-the-line education to their students. Our services also help the bottom line by avoiding large capital expenditures and the need to recruit, retain, and continually retrain a large IT staff that can handle the critical demands of their connected educational organization.

For more information on how CBTS is helping higher education IT leaders read this case study and this interview with Paul Czarapata, VP and CIO of the multi-campus Kentucky Community & Technical College System (KCTCS).

Explore how the Communications solutions at CBTS can help support your BYOD demand here. 

Paul Czarapata, VP and CIO of the multi-campus Kentucky Community & Technical College System (KCTCS), says adaptability is the best approach when it comes to meeting the needs of students, faculty, visitors, and internal IT staff.  

Czarapata oversees all IT systems for the state-run higher education system that includes 16 different colleges and over 500 buildings. 

KCTCS began partnering with CBTS in 2003. Today, CBTS operates the KCTCS Unified Communications solution, as well as a wireless Network as a Service (NaaS) solution with Cisco Aironet access points that provides WiFi at all campuses, and access to a virtual data center containing 26 servers. 

The CIO also manages an internal IT staff of 35 people, and works closely with IT employees at the individual colleges.  

Employees provide extra expertise across a range of areas, including security, managing SaaS applications such as Office 365 and Salesforce, and keeping the KCTCS ERP system from PeopleSoft up-to-date.   

IT staffers at individual sites, meanwhile, help CBTS manage the UCaaS and NaaS solutions. 

“CBTS is so experienced and has so many clients that they’ve seen it all. They know just what to do with just about every conceivable issue,” Czarapata says. 

Recruiting IT staff 

When it comes to recruiting and retaining high-quality IT staff, “flexibility is the key,” Czarapata says.  

Consequently, Czarapata is flexible when it comes to staff scheduling. Attendance at some activities, such as IT staff meetings, is mandatory.  “But beyond that, it’s OK if someone wants to work from 10-6 instead of 9-5, or to telecommute from home a couple of days a week. Everyone faces their own life issues.”  

As another enticement, all KCTCS employees can take six college courses per year for free. Benefits also include three or four weeks of vacation, two weeks of institutional closing, and a generous retirement program. 

Meeting end users’ IT demands 

Czarapata worked with CBTS to customize the UCaaS and NaaS solutions to meet the IT needs of campus end users.  

Typical features of the CBTS-managed UCaaS solution include Voice over IP, videoconferencing, instant messaging, email, contact center, and enhanced 911. 

In addition to these features, CBTS helped KCTCS integrate a phone-enabled alert system that is capable of sending instant alerts to the 7,500 Cisco IP phones used by staff about any type of emergency.  

The biggest IT challenge for KCTCS is meeting the constantly increasing needs of students, faculty, and guests for WiFi bandwidth, the CIO said. 

The KCTCS system does not include dorms, but students do much of their coursework on campus, and course materials include increasingly bandwidth-intensive videos and other courseware solutions. 

Czarapata worked with CBTS to deploy wireless access points that provide students with WiFi across campus, including parking lots in some cases.  

Solutions will also meet future demands 

The WiFi solution also meets the demand from guests who include everyone from K-12 teachers and local residents using college libraries, to high school students touring campus. 

Soon, members of the state police will take continuing education classes at KCTCS instead of going to the training headquarters in Richmond, KY via streaming video which also requires WiFi access. 

KCTCS is prepared. Czarapata and his IT team worked with CBTS to ensure the WiFi solution can leverage the state Wide Area Network backbone and the local backup provider. 

As Czarapata says, it’s all about flexibility.

To read more about the CBTS-KCTCS partnership, read this case study.

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The ability to run Voice over IP has unleashed a wave of innovative Unified Communications solutions that are delivering value from a mobility, collaboration, and cost perspective to organizations of all sizes.

CBTS, which manages, hosts, or maintains more than 700,000 end points across our suite of Unified Communications solutions, regularly meets with clients to help them understand the advantages of these products, and to tailor specific solutions that will help deliver business outcomes.

Tony King, Solution Lead for CBTS, recently discussed the workplace and technology trends that are moving organizations toward Unified Communications solutions, and the benefits these solutions offer.

What is driving clients toward Unified Communications solutions?

The No. 1 driver is total cost of ownership. That’s what we see from small business all the way to enterprise clients. Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) gives them an easy, pay-as-you-go, predictable monthly expense, and the service and equipment refreshes as needed. Unified Communications solutions scale users and applications up or down easily. And Unified Communications solutions allow internal IT organizations to focus on value-added initiatives, as opposed to worrying about running a communications platform.

How is the shift in workplace environments impacting demand for Unified Communications solutions?

A typical office today looks nothing like it did 10 years ago. Everybody used to have a designated cube with a designated phone sitting on their desk. They came in and worked from 8-5. You had a mobile phone, but it was separate from your business phone.

Today, you walk into many offices and there are open areas where people come in and work. Many employees don’t even have a designated work space. And everybody uses their smartphones.

Our solutions have to be centric to that. But we also have to be centric to the fact that each client wants a business identity of some type. Employees are still using phones, but the phone may be in a conference room. Or, the employee may not spend very much time in the office and so they have calls forwarded to their mobile phones. Or, the employee needs the ability to pick up any phone in the office, or their mobile phone, and have the call appear as though it’s being delivered from a single business number.

It all goes back to mobility being in high demand. We need the ability to access information immediately on our mobile devices, whether it’s a business call, e-mail, or another application. And we want to do it from anywhere.

What else do your clients need from their communications platform?

Our clients demand the flexibility that collaboration software brings to the table. A lot of that software is focused on making meetings more efficient. How much productivity is lost when people can’t physically make a meeting on time?

Our suite of Unified Communications solutions meets all of these needs for mobility, efficiency, and collaboration. And, getting back to my first point, our solutions provide significant cost of ownership advantages.

What does total cost of ownership look like for organizations that still manage their own communications platform?

The alternative to a managed Unified Communications solution is going out and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars – or, in the case of an enterprise organization, millions of dollars – on a platform that the client really doesn’t know how to run, and that the client is not familiar with from a technology perspective.

Total cost of ownership also includes staffing. If a client has an aging communications platform, the expertise required to manage that platform at some point becomes difficult to find. So it’s not just the cost of buying the platform, it’s the difficulty of keeping a highly trained, full-time employee on board.

And you have the hamster wheel of life cycle management. You purchase something in Year 1, knowing that you’ll need to upgrade sometime in Years 3-5. By that time, the technology you’re using may very well be out of date.

That brings me back to this question: Do you want your IT organization managing your communications platform, or do you want it focused on initiatives that generate revenue or some other positive outcome for your business?

The needs also must vary with respect to different verticals. How does that inform the CBTS approach?

That’s right. Some retail businesses, for example, are very transactional. Other retail businesses hardly use the phone. An automotive parts retail shop will take a lot of phone calls every day from multiple customers, so they need a platform that facilitates that connectivity. A shoe store, on the other hand, may take one phone call an hour and have different needs.

We also have clients in verticals like healthcare that are experiencing a lot of consolidation. A client might have 10 different PBX vendors because it grew by acquisition, and each site had its own telephony platform. The client might not even know what they have, and come to us for help with managing the current system, and to create a plan that will eventually migrate them to a Unified Communications solution with single pane of glass management.

So understanding business needs – even when those businesses are inside the same vertical, or in a complex vertical like healthcare – is critical and central to the CBTS approach. We have deep experience in delivering Unified Communications solutions, and tailoring those solutions to meet our clients’ specific needs. That ability sets CBTS apart.

Regardless of who else is on the green, golfers are always competing with one player in particular: Themselves. And in recent years, wearable technology and devices have helped golfers improve on their last best game.

Devices for golfers interested in “the quantifiable self” have come a long way since they first debuted more than five years ago. Zepp Golf, for example, is a pioneer in helping golfers analyze their swings. Its products have evolved to include on-course performance and provide resources for coaches.

Golden State Warriors swingman Andre Iguodala has been using wearables including Zepp Golf to improve his swing, but as he told SportsTechie last summer, we’re merely scratching the surface of what’s to come in terms of devices that track athlete performance. The 2015 NBA Finals MVP is also a tech investor and avidly watching the wearables market. He sees a lot of opportunity for devices geared toward amateurs.

Several companies offer wearable technology

Companies including Samsung and Garmin are putting their own golf tees in the ground. Garmin, which is known for its GPS devices and fitness trackers, recently unveiled its Approach X10, a wearable for rookie golfers. The company’s new golfing buddy is compatible with its existing golf app, and tells golfers how far they are from the pin on more than 41,000 pre-loaded courses worldwide. Its built-in GPS knows when a golfer has moved to the next hole, and it provides distances to the front, back, and middle of the green, as well as any hazards.

Samsung’s most recent foray into golf metrics is via a partnership with myRoundPro, which tracks performance through the strokes-gained statistical analysis metric that the PGA Tour made popular. The collaboration includes an exclusive myRoundPro app developed with Samsung that provides front, middle, and back yardages to each green. The app records scores and provides a statistical breakdown after each round. Golfers can also assign a club to each shot for more detailed analysis.

Wearables and apps are the primary ways golfers – amateur or professional – currently better understand and improve performance either at the range or over 18 holes, but competition is coming in the form of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). This future may include a wearable that covers your whole body.

Is the wearable full-body suit the future of golf?

An India-based startup is developing what is categorized as a mixed-reality wearable. Kaaya Tech’s full-body HoloSuit tracks the body as it goes through a variety of motions using pants, a jacket, and gloves. The product can create meaningful and accurate simulations by collecting data about how people move.

The HoloSuit tracks and visualizes the movements of the golfer’s swing, and then provides insights into how the golfer can correct inconsistencies and swing problems developed over the years with automated suggestions that are stored in the cloud.

The HoloSuit computer currently learns what to look for and encourages the golfer to meet certain standards. Future simulations will tap the knowledge of a specific trainer that provides more personalized feedback.

Kaaya Tech’s HoloSuit is a sign of what’s to come for sports trackers in general, golf swing analysis in particular, and future PGA competitors.