Black Box, a global solutions integrator, today unveiled the Digital Workplace, a service focused on unified communications and collaboration (UCC) in today's increasingly digital and virtual workplace environments. By adding a new strategy — managed UCC as a service in the cloud — to its existing on-premises UCC offering, Black Box addresses companies' evolving requirements for business continuity and the expanding need to support an increasingly remote, multigenerational and geographically dispersed workforce.

The Black Box Digital Workplace breaks down departmental communications silos to offer a single, cooperative digital solution integrating the industry's most popular communications applications for phone, collaboration, file sharing and video conferencing/screensharing. As a result, everyone has the freedom to communicate and collaborate remotely from any location via a single cloud or on-premises network with the applications they already use. Employees from four generations — baby boomers, Generation X, millennials, and Generation Z — are able to work together virtually according to their own needs and preferences, while still feeling part of a larger corporate culture that values work ethic and teaming.

"The pandemic has accelerated many organizations' adoption of digital workplace solutions and exposed a critical need for effective business continuity in times of crisis. There's never been greater demand for solutions that deliver the seamless connectivity and collaboration workers need to be productive, from any location in the world," said Doug Oathout, senior vice president of strategy and partnerships, Black Box. "Black Box is ideally positioned to help customers transition from legacy operations to the new Digital Workplace. Not only are we deeply invested in these types of solutions, but we understand our customers' current and future needs and have the tools, processes and expertise to help them be successful in the 'new normal' of remote collaboration."

The Black Box Digital Workplace solution is delivered in three components:

• Premises UCC, in which Black Box will work with partners to create a customized UCC solution that meets the customer's specific business requirements and provides modern, premise-based voice, video and collaboration solutions.

• Managed UCaaS, a subscription-based UCC service managed by Black Box leveraging cloud offerings from two key partners. UCaaS bundles best-in-class UCaaS solutions together with professional deployment, migration and support services to help clients move from legacy to modern UCC environments.

• Premises-to-Cloud Upgrade, a service that allows customers to transition to the cloud at their own pace and build in flexibility for future UCC requirements

The Managed UCaaS migration offering employs a robust design, deploy and support methodology implemented by a global team of technicians who can implement demanding single-location solutions as well as those that span hundreds of locations, all with consistency, speed and agility.