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We sat down with David Renfree, Manager of Voice & UC Enterprise Specialists at Colt, to explore how unified communications and network simplification are helping IT leaders reduce complexity, relieve pressure and drive strategic value across their organisations.
As part of our “Pressure Off, Power On” campaign, this solution pillar, Transform your workplace, highlights how modern communication solutions, supported by agentic AI and intelligent collaboration tools, are enabling businesses to operate more efficiently, innovate faster, and empower their teams to focus on growing rather than stalling.
IT teams everywhere are under pressure. What are the biggest challenges you're seeing across the organisations you’re talking to right now?
“Complexity and inconsistency. Many organisations are running a mixture of legacy kit, multiple voice providers, and overlapping UC and contact centre platforms. This creates administrative overhead, varied user experiences, and risk. When you add skills shortages, security concerns and budget constraints, you end up with IT teams spending more time keeping the lights on than improving how people work.
The title of this campaign – 'Pressure Off, Power On’ is an intriguing one, especially in the context of enterprise communications. It’s all about taking weight off of IT teams by simplifying the communications stack and standardising the way people communicate with each other. We enable the business tools that help them get work done.
“Pressure off’ is consolidation and reliability, simplifying the communications environment for the customer. ‘Power on’ is the ability to improve customer service, communications, how to glean benefits from the latest technology, and to focus on outcomes – not just firefighting.”
Many organisations are sitting on tangled infrastructure that has been built over years. What’s the danger in that, and what’s the opportunity in modernising?
“The danger is fragility and cost. Small changes take too long, incidents are harder to diagnose, and every exception becomes a support ticket. The opportunity lies in streamlining: fewer vendors, consistent policies, clear SLAs, and services that can be scaled up or down quickly. You can remove complexity and improve user experience, freeing up budget for other services, which will improve your productivity.
The road to simplification has a few yet necessary obstacles to navigate:
- Removing dependency on the customer premises, single points of failure, and adopting a cloud-first strategy.
- Integrating cloud services with the network and security that you already use.
- Consolidating carrier connectivity and focusing on cloud connectivity from the public phone network straight into unified communications and contact centre platforms, with intelligent routing decisions delivered directly from within the cloud.”
Where are you seeing the fastest adoption of unified communications solutions, and what’s driving it?
“Anywhere that hybrid work and customer contact are business critical. Regulated sectors moving from ageing PBXs, global firms consolidating after mergers and acquisitions, and organisations facing PSTN TDM switch-offs.
The drivers are simple: reduce cost, improve reliability, have consistent features for users wherever they are, and make change safer, faster and easier.”
Let’s talk about outcomes. What have your customers been able to do because they simplified their communications environment?
“Speed of provisioning is a massively positive outcome. Customers can scale up and down in a few hours, not weeks. Fewer support and faster mean time to repair (MTTR) incidents both add benefit, which can even be felt at our customers’ customers’ end. Amendments are simple tasks rather than entire projects. Adding functionality is so much easier, whether that be compliant call-recording or AI analytics, or just the latest feature which is automatically available to the end user as soon as it’s released.”
For IT leaders considering change but worried about disruption, what would you say to them?
“You don’t have to do it all at once. There’s no need to have a big bang approach if that doesn’t suit your organisation. We often start with pilot groups and can run services in parallel where needed. We manage your migration to take the risk out of the process. Some groups are easier to move than others; we work with customers to avoid the traditional disruption associated with on-premises telephony replacement.”
Agentic AI is starting to reshape how people interact with systems. How do you think that will impact enterprise communications and networks?
“There’s a lot of confusion. ‘We need an AI strategy’ is about as useful a statement as ‘we need a software strategy’. AI is a set of capabilities that will sit inside the tools you already use and covers a huge number of different topics. Already prevalent features include noise cancellation, transcription, meeting summaries, virtual assistance, knowledge sharing and accessibility tools. Agentic AI making call routing decisions and finding answers through API data dips into external cloud CRM platforms is going to dramatically change how customers interact with contact centres.
It’s an exciting time for user experience; the latest large language models (LLMs) are far more capable than legacy ‘chatbots’ and frustrating interactive voice response (IVR) results.”
AI-led productivity tools in platforms like Microsoft Teams, such as auto-scheduling, meeting transcription and smart summarisation, are already here. How do they fit into the bigger picture of network simplification and efforts to transform your workplace?
"They only deliver real value if the basics are solid. A reliable network, consistent policies and proper connectivity turn these features from novelties into tools that save time. Meeting notes and minutes can be automated, freeing people to focus on the discussion. Real-time translation can make global teams far more effective, but if those features sit only in meetings and not in the contact centre, users get frustrated.
The way forward is to consolidate onto fewer communications platforms and ensure the network connections into the cloud are simple and dependable. That is what transforms the workplace: the tools feel seamless, and the organisation spends less time holding them together.”
Finally, what excites you the most about the future of unified communications and contact centres?
“What excites me is how UC and contact centre services are starting to come together. They’ve been treated as separate for a long time, but most businesses want the same thing from both: straightforward, reliable tools that make life easier for their teams and their customers, with platforms that let someone move from an internal call to a customer conversation without changing systems and losing context along the way.
AI will add to this by removing some of the repetitive work and improving the flow for both employees and customers. It's not about merely adding features; it’s about making everyday work simpler and improving customer experience. That shift towards a more joined-up and consistent experience is what I find genuinely exciting.”
To find out more about Colt’s Unified Communications, head to our dedicated solutions page.
