De-risking and Optimizing UCC Management

Written by Walter Monasterio – Former VP Channel and Service Providers, Americas | Aug 29, 2017 2:00:00 PM

Under the "UCC Management" umbrella there are a variety of projects happening. Two such projects are the de-risking of UCC and optimizing UCC. While they're both part of the same initiative, they should be treated separately. De-risking mitigates against challenges whereas optimization drives greater performance and maximizes the impact of high performing UCC.

Setting UCC Performance Benchmarks

When de-risking UCC the initial goal is to set a benchmark asking questions like; what must the service look like? Is it highly available? Are people able to consume it? After that they can move onto optimizing it based on the different lines of business and how ever users want to consume particular modalities.

The Biggest Risks with UCC Management

The biggest risk is not having a highly available optimized solution for their users. UCC investments are large investments and the biggest risk is failing to drive user adoption. You've spent the money, deployed the technology and if people are still relying on old habits it will limit your ability to invest in collaboration tools in the future.

Where to Start De-risking and Optimizing UCC

UC Managers should start their UCC optimization plans by understanding where they are in the lifecycle of the UC solution. If it's a new deployment there's a benefit of being able to start from the ground up; interviewing business stakeholders to understand how they will consume and deploy the technologies. If it's an existing deployment it's important to identify what's working and what's not working. Stabilize what's working and improve it and afterwards work on the areas where they might have some challenges in the environment.

The Greatest Optimization Opportunity...

The greatest area for optimization is ensuring ultimate adoption. A lot of people see UC as collaboration tools that sit on people's desktops however if the environment isn't optimized and everyone isn't having the best experience user adoption will never peak. Driving organic growth, use and adoption of the solution should be the focus.

The Role Channel Partners Play in De-risking and Optimizing UCC

Channel partners have years of experience, consultants, whole armies of people that are singularly focused on optimizing these environments. Their role is to come in and be a business consultant and a technology consultant. First they want to talk to customers, understand how they want consume the different modalities of UC and how it should be deployed in their environments. And secondly the technology consultants come in and they ensure the right deployments are done and they have the right tools in place to make sure they are driving great user experience.

IR worked with a large Cisco Service Provider in the Americas and while they had a UC solution deployed they struggled in management and keeping it up to date with new releases, being proactive with their customers. We worked with them through Prognosis and they were able to optimize the environment, going from reactive to proactive serving the lines of business including their external customers. It made such a difference that their approval rating from their customers jumped in excess of 50%.

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