With demand for businesses to consume collaboration services in the cloud at an all-time high right now, CDW has added the Cisco Unified Communications Manager Cloud (UCM Cloud) solution to its Managed Collaboration Anywhere (MCA) portfolio. This portfolio now includes managed collaboration solutions covering the complete Cisco Hosted and Cloud Calling portfolio of Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS), Cisco UCM Cloud and Cisco Webex Calling. Cisco is currently providing collaboration solutions that deliver enterprise-grade service to more than 100 million devices.

Due to various factors such as cost-efficiency, flexibility and availability, organizations are trying to leverage the infrastructure from various cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, Google and IBM. Within the CDW cloud practice, we are finding that organizations are taking different paths. Some organizations are in an early experimental stage as they try to understand the various capabilities provided by the cloud, while other customers are fully operating in the cloud.

The connected campus can have a number of benefits for colleges and universities, ranging from improved security to enhanced collaboration — and, of course, it can create a competitive edge in student and faculty recruitment. But to enable effective end-user solutions, institutions must first invest in the networking and data center infrastructure necessary to power them.

Colleges and universities looking to provide students and faculty with a robust connected-campus experience should explore the following infrastructure solutions and practices.

More and more organizations are looking to migrate services to the cloud and toward a more OPEX subscription billing experience — but how does that change affect the contact center? As the contact center technical architect for CDW’s research and development group, I spend much of my time looking at products and determining where they fit within our customers’ spectrum of needs. Cloud Contact Center has been at the forefront of my research and development.

In this series, I am taking a deep dive into several collaboration solutions and how they may fit into your business. Check out my first blog post about RingCentral, and keep reading to learn about our next featured vendor: Five9.

Look at nearly any new offering from the largest names in technology — Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others — and you’re likely to find an accompanying environmental and sustainability initiative.

There’s been a growing awareness in recent years about the impact of energy use by corporate data centers, both on the environment and on organizations’ bottom lines. Public cloud hyperscalers have recognized this concern and have responded by optimizing their environments to help organizations meet their spending and sustainability goals.

As you make decisions about where to place your IT workloads, keep the following considerations in mind.

Judging from search engine traffic — and from the calls I receive — there’s some confusion out there about hybrid cloud and multicloud. In truth, both are completely viable models, with various organizations relying on each to achieve significant business benefits. But before IT and business leaders can decide which approach makes the most sense for them, they need to step back and ask themselves what outcomes they are trying to achieve.