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Unified communications and collaboration solutions offer more than convenience in today’s fast-paced, real-time business environment. They are quickly becoming a necessity to effectively compete. Unifying communications tools, such as telephony, voice and e-mail messaging, Web collaboration, instant messaging, presence and video streaming, allows workers to access a single user interface from almost any device and from virtually anywhere – enabling seamless and more productive communication and collaboration across voice, data and video. With the help of UC&C solutions, organizations can improve access to expert know-how, enhance collaboration across the organization and spend more time with customers and other stakeholders without incurring the costs and delays associated with locating people, arranging for meetings at a single physical location, or expensive and time-consuming travel.
The benefits to most organizations of deploying UC&C applications are clear, whether the organization is a small or medium sized business or a large enterprise. Additionally, whether the organization deploys the UC&C infrastructure themselves, chooses to outsource UC&C management to a managed service provider or purchases UC&C as a hosted cloud service, the efficiencies enabled by the acquisition of UC&C solutions hold the potential to lower costs, improve customer service, reduce carbon footprint, and increase agility.
Realizing the promise of UC&C solutions
Achieving the efficiencies made possible by UC&C will depend on more than simply making the investment to deploy a UC&C solution. Organizations can’t assume that just by implementing a UC&C solution in their data centers or obtaining it from a service provider that the application will behave optimally. The end-to-end performance of UC&C solutions and their supporting infrastructure must be managed to ensure that the quality of service and quality of experience associated with them deliver on the promise that UC&C holds for the organization.
The top three layers of the UC&C application stack are the real business enablers that empower people to get work done collaboratively, accelerate business processes and achieve significant productivity gains. For the most part these layers consist of real-time applications and video, which require more from a QoS perspective than conventional best-efforts class of service policies. Inadequate QoS will cause bandwidth-hungry voice, video or telepresence applications to suffer from delay variation or packet loss that will likely result in poor image and sound quality. And with real-time applications, a service performance issue may not merely degrade the experience of the end user – it can render the application useless.
Business users will have little tolerance for an inferior Web, video conferencing, or telepresence experience or an IP telephony call with poor quality. For both IT organizations and service providers, these negative experiences with a UC&C solution will lead to dissatisfaction among end users that will erode the value of the UC&C investment by the organization. And for service providers, it can result in eventual customer churn. Creating a seamless experience for their UC&C service recipients will require IT organizations and service providers to implement reliable and resilient QoS and QoE measures within the delivery network, data center and UC&C applications environment to guarantee service continuity and performance. All of this points to the critical need for a comprehensive UC&C performance assurance solution.
Delivering high quality UC&C services in a managed or hosted environment
Looking specifically to the challenges faced by service providers; ensuring the continuity of managed or hosted UC&C services will require a number of capabilities, including the ability to:
–Holistically monitor and manage the multiple domains that make up the complex and interdependent UC&C environment – from the underlying network infrastructure (routers, switches, PBXs), to the virtual and physical data center and UC&C applications, to end-user devices.
–Keep the quality of the user experience high and maintain each customer’s contracted and stringent service levels with an early warning system that provides alerts to help operations teams proactively identify performance degradation as well as reduce mean time to repair.
–Properly manage and individually report on the many customers serviced in the shared managed, hosted or cloud UC&C services environment, including capabilities for aggregated and detailed contextual analytics and views (including by customer, business unit, location hierarchy) and visibility into call detail records.
–Address the dynamic and elastic nature of cloud services and the virtualized data center through adaptive intelligence of performance impact (customers to infrastructure two-way quality impact analysis capabilities).
–Understand changing utilization patterns for effective service growth, rightsizing and resource planning
Adopting a comprehensive UC&C assurance solution will allow service providers to meet the challenges and the performance management requirements of the UC&C service environment. The right solution will have a carrier-class architecture that includes multi-tiered customer and service modeling, scalability, hierarchical analysis and navigation and role-based security features. To enhance operational efficiencies, reduce the complexity and cost of UC&C performance monitoring, and expedite troubleshooting, a unified and cross-silo view of the end-to-end UC&C service delivery environment plus real-time visibility into the key metrics that affect voice, messaging and collaboration service quality is needed.
A UC&C assurance solution that includes off-the-shelf performance metrics as part of an extensible, customizable architecture will accelerate time to market for UC&C services, enable service providers to differentiate from the competition with their services, and reduce capital expenditures and operational expenditure costs. Service providers should look for a solution that supports a full complement of network components, servers and applications from leading UC&C vendor platforms, such as Cisco System Inc.’s Hosted Collaboration Solution architecture. Service providers will also benefit from a solution that seamlessly integrates with existing infrastructure and operating practices.
Armed with these UC&C assurance capabilities, service providers and IT organizations will be able to deliver on the promise that UC&C solutions hold for their customers and end users, enabling them to operate their businesses with greater efficiency, reduced costs, improved satisfaction, and enhanced agility. And for the service provider, delivering this critical business tool and exceeding customer expectations will also result in improved customer loyalty, differentiated service offerings, and increased revenues.
Kathleen Ayres is a product marketing manager for InfoVista, a leading proactive service assurance management software company. InfoVista empowers telecom operators, services providers and large enterprises to maximize business return and productivity by assuring the optimal performance of mission-critical networked services, applications, and infrastructures. Ayres can be reached at [email protected].
