<p>The decade-long transition from analog phones to IPtelephony systems deployments set the stage for a dramatically shorter transition frommandatory on-premises solutions to hosted or "cloud-based" options for voice and unifiedcommunications.</p><p>With this new alternative, though, network managers need to take a fresh look at how the total cost of ownership (TCO)compares between the two approaches. In this article, we'll explore the most significant elementsof capital expense (CAPEX) and operationalexpense (OPEX)of enterprise-class unified communication solutions.</p><p>If there is a single reason to considerhosted UC, it would be to control CAPEX costs. Hosted UC solutions will typically charge aper-user license fee, and that's it. All of the hardware typically associated with traditional,on-premises telephony/UC solutions disappears -- at least from perspective of a network manager orvoice engineer.</p><p>The infrastructure elements required to provide UC functions -- such as voice mail, chat,calling, presence and so forth -- reside in the data center of your service provider. Your publicor private IP connection to that cloud provides the path for your users to access thatfunctionality.</p><p><a href="http://searchunifiedcommunications.techtarget.com/tip/Calculating-TCO-of-hosted-unified-communications-solutions">Keep reading...</a></p>