High River — September 27, 2016 — It’s 9:00am Monday morning, one of your employees walks into your office with a frantic look on her face. You hold your finger up and motion to her to “hold on a second” as you pick up the phone to make the most important call of the day. There’s no dial tone. You open up your email to find out what’s going on and your internet is down. Just when matters can’t get any worse your computer screen turns blue with an error message that says “fatal error.” You look up and ten of your employees are experiencing the same issues. In the past, you would have had to call the phone company, your internet provider and your IT consultant in order to get your business back up and running. Now you can solve all three problems with one call to your unified communications provider.

Unified communications providers have emerged as the predominant technology leaders in today’s markets because they have taken sole responsibility for solving all three of these problems for the end user. Historically, many businesses were forced to work with three separate entities in order to solve their technological problems which caused a great deal of frustration for organizations that were simply looking to get back to business.

Recently, it’s become even more difficult to pinpoint the root of a technological problem because voice today is an application on the data network and both are sharing the same Internet bandwidth. Oftentimes, phone companies and Internet providers blame one another for poor network performance and the business owner is the one that ends up paying the price. Unified communications providers have approached this problem from a global perspective to ensure that a client’s technology is functioning properly, regardless to whether the nature of the problem is voice-based or data based.

Unified communication companies differentiate themselves in the marketplace because of their technical expertise when it comes to managing all aspects of a customer’s network. In fact, true unified communication providers support the IT needs of small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) by providing technology such as computers, servers, monitoring, antivirus and spam protection. While telephony has dramatically changed and become network centric, the unified communications provider has taken the necessary steps to understand the intricacies of providing telephony on a data network. These companies utilize sophisticated bandwidth management tools to ensure proper connectivity and throughput in order to deliver an optimal experience. Only a select few companies possess the expertise necessary to handle the IT, telephony and Internet connectivity needs of today’s small to mid-sized business.

“In order to make life easier for our customers, we needed to evolve our business,” commented John Coleman, Director of JEI Tech. “It’s been a long road but we’re glad that we’ve hit our goal of becoming a true unified communications provider. The bottom line for our customers is that when they have a need for IT, Telephony or Internet, they have one place to call. That’s our differentiator and that’s why we will continue to be a market leader for years to come.”