Most of today’s chatter about hosted unified communications (UC) centers on the menu of tools it serves up for communicating and collaborating easier and faster. And it should – UC rolls many valuable functions into a single app for both mobile and desktop use that can boost everything from employee and customer satisfaction to raw productivity. These integrations – conferencing, availability indication, chat, desktop sharing and file sharing, to name just a few – are so appealing that the core meat-and-potatoes functionality is often overlooked: The right hosted UC platform can deliver a powerful, flexible and incredibly reliable phone system.

A solid UC platform starts with high-definition (HD) voice for clarity and layers in a long list of PBX features, including auto attendant, custom music on hold, hunt groups, meet-me conferencing, call recording, voicemail transcription and CRM integration, among others.

Hosted UC does this at a fraction of the cost of an equivalent premises-based UC system and “auto-evolves” via updates in the background. That’s a huge advantage over on-premises systems that require annual maintenance fees or expensive upgrades to keep them current. And unlike the complex traditional phone systems that sit in a closet, hosted UC requires very little IT support or training to administer, freeing up your team to take on more strategic initiatives.

Of course, none of this matters if your phones go down. Reliability and redundancy are key to the success of any hosted UC deployment. TPx’s UCx platform leverages application servers running enterprise-grade UC software in SSAE 18 datacenters. This hosted environment integrates our customers’ traffic and performs PBX and other UC functions in the cloud. Since TPx engineers relied upon leading-edge technology throughout, we’re able to back our UCx offering with an industry-best, 100-percent network uptime guarantee.

So, if your building suffers from a flood or other disaster that knocks out power for miles around, the distributed nature of the UCx service means that your communications infrastructure can still be available.  Since UCx resides on the TPx network and not on your premises, it’s easy to redirect calls to alternate locations or devices. Employees could even work from home in a pinch because they can communicate and access all the information they need from virtually anywhere.

Regardless of which UC system you use, it’s important to remember that your phones are your lifeline. Yes, apps and value-adds are important – at TPx we have loaded our offering with the latest-and-greatest of all of them – but the most important aspect of any UC deployment is reliability. And that’s especially true today. Forecasts tell us that more frequent floods, fires, hurricanes and other complications are part of our “new normal.” Make sure your UC system can stand up to the tests of these new realities.