Building a Solid Foundation for your UC Future

Next-generation digital collaboration encompasses innovative communication technologies that helps enterprises shift towards building more cohesive and efficient team, and workstream relationships. The Unified Communications & Collaborations (UCC) market is constantly evolving in response to the growing need for flexibility and ecosystem-driven approach across multiple devices, enabling united user experience. Thus, to empower every person to achieve more and provide an experience-centric culture and trust, organizations are channelizing their focus to develop solutions which can be tailored to meet their specific needs in real-time.

Outlined below are some of the factors that play a major role in re-engineering the digital collaboration stack:

• Cloud first approach – It is one of the key tenets that define the future strategy of an enterprise. While some enterprises lean towards hosted, custom-built services, others prefer the flexibility and lower cost of unified communications as a service (UCaaS).
• Video becoming the next voice – Video is a powerful tool for effective communication and collaboration, and has become a norm in enterprises enabling people to join from different devices, anywhere and anytime. Today, more and more businesses are adopting cloud-based video conferencing solutions for seamless collaboration and improved productivity without worrying about hardware and infrastructure costs.
• Application and workflow integration – Integrating collaboration workflows with business applications has become an essential strategy to future proof the enterprise communication roadmap. The availability of a wide spectrum of APIs from a growing number of UCC vendors has created immense opportunities for the DevOps teams. These include prospects such as integration of platforms with existing applications to create new customized applications for features like reporting and call management.
• The confluence of AI and the workplace – While natural language processing (NLP) enables transformation by allowing enterprises to easily find and exploit information contained in vast stores of unstructured content, conversational user interfaces represent the ultimate value that a combination of speech recognition, NLP, and machine learning repositories can deliver. As the use of software defined functions goes mainstream in UCC, chatbots, virtual assistants, augmented analytics and machine learning enabled use cases will optimize workforce dexterity.

With these underlying factors, pioneers, innovators, and experimenters, HCL and IR are working together, towards a future workplace that is increasingly mobile and diverse, by enabling organizations to optimize and empower employees as they adopt and adapt to new technologies with ease.

The HCL – IR synergy

The HCL-IR strategic partnership offers capabilities like real-time monitoring, management, optimization, and UC automation. HCL’s offering, Evolve, bundled in modules for monitoring, migration, and vendor interoperability, uses IR Prognosis as an integral component in the monitoring and real-time analytics module. The partnership helps enterprises with cloud-based network readiness assessment and to proactively detect issues pertaining to voice or video communications. HCL’s proprietary open source automation and orchestration platform, NetBot, integrates with Evolve stack through APIs and workflows, which can be coded to auto-remediate repetitive and time-consuming tasks. This process of workflow-based automation can help enterprises automate a variety of use cases across provisioning and management of UC infrastructure.

HCL has developed a chatbot for AI enabled collaboration that utilizes an NLP engine at the backend and can talk to UC monitoring tools, ITSM systems, and element monitoring systems. Using Prognosis performance management tools to monitor, manage, and optimize the performance of UCC environments is one way in which you can ensure that your systems are working optimally. These tools remove some of the complexity by enabling users to automate repetitive tasks, connect intelligent alerts and automatic fixes, and gain deep visibility across their entire communications ecosystem, which ultimately leads to a better UC experience.

Integration with HCL NetBot and partnership with IR helps take the UC automation runbooks and AI enabled platforms to another level. Both HCL and IR are committed to helping their users realize the full potential of their UC technologies, to ensure that their systems are indeed making things easier, more efficient, and more productive, now and into the future.

This blog was co-authored by Jason Barker, Senior Vice President AMEA at IR and Abhinav Gupta, Head - Product Marketing for HCL Digital Foundation Portfolio at HCL.