Cloud (NextUC) to the Rescue! (A true story…)

Yesterday I received a call from someone I had not spoken with in over a year. One year ago, he had signed up his company for a trial of NextUC’s hosted Lync. The product had just been released and was in the very early beta stage. At that time, there was no Office365 integration for unified messaging, voicemail, or auto attendant, so he decided to discontinue his NextUC service in favor of an on premise Lync and Exchange deployment.

When I spoke to him yesterday, he was in the midst of a crisis involving a near implosion of his Exchange server and a seriously troubled Lync Server. More than once, he had to leave our conversation to take a call relating to his infrastructure “meltdown.” Between interruptions, he told me the up-front cost of his on premise solution was substantial and he had been battling with the hardware ever since.

After explaining his current situation, he asked what NextUC has done in the year since he had tried the product and was thrilled to learn of the full UM integration with Office365 hosted Exchange. Almost immediately, our conversation ended so that he could get his company’s email moved over to Office365 but he assured me he would call back when he was up and running with email.

Sure enough, the phone rang about an hour later and he was ready to set up his NextUC accounts and enable the integration with his new Office365 Exchange Online Plan 2. It only took a few minutes to provision NextUC hosted Lync for his entire organization. With the two products, he now had email, IM with presence, voicemail and unified messaging and even web conferencing with integrated audio and video.

So, in one afternoon, this guy was able to not just replace, but upgrade his entire communications infrastructure with Office365 and NextUC hosted Lync. Wow.

Written by Bob Barnes