BT is a leading global communications service provider. They combine their global strengths in networking, cloud-based unified collaboration, hybrid cloud services and security with their deep expertise and global delivery model to be a trusted partner for their customers.
Prognosis is the strategic tool of choice for BT’s Global Services division to provide proactive UCaaS performance management to their managed service customers since 2016.
Challenges
Moving to the cloud is often perceived as risky and when organisations migrate it’s important to ensure performance meets expectations and is able to keep up with new demands.
As BT customers began moving from on-premises enterprise solutions to managed cloud services they required high level insights on the continuing UC performance management of their communications environment.
Solution & Benefits
Prognosis represented an opportunity for BT to have an overarching UC performance monitoring system for their entire UC ecosystem.
BT’s initial need was to identify a performance tool extendable to end customers but other benefits emerged along the way.
End Customer Dashboards
With Prognosis, all BT customers get the same key health indicator dashboards. BT tailored the dashboards to give their customers visibility to three focus areas: voice quality, service availability and device status. BT’s operational teams then built their own views looking at the same data. This ensured both the end customer and BT were aligned at all times.
Customers wanted a realistic view of all the traffic lights; to see outages as well as what’s up and running. Too many red lights can instill unnecessary panic, so BT have a balanced view on their dashboards so customers can understand what’s happening without being bombarded with too much information.
“Customer facing dashboards add great value. If a BT customer is reporting something and the data is aligned to our operational team’s dashboard there is an end-to-end cohesiveness. Our team will see what they see… and more.”
Tim Kelly
Product Marketing BT
Vendor Agnostic Difficulty
Prognosis was a natural choice for BT One Cloud Cisco as it wasn’t the first branch of Prognosis in BT - it was already deployed successfully to BT One Cloud Microsoft. It meant that in the future, should the two be joined, interoperability would not be an issue - it would be a building block.
It was clear Prognosis is scalable, multi-vendor capable and didn’t exist in a silo.
Visibility into Cloud Managed Service
It’s an interesting line to have to walk as a cloud provider - customers outsource the service to be managed but still require visibility.
Prognosis gives end customers the visibility they demand so they are not blind to what is happening in their UC ecosystem. This eases concerns and provides an extra layer of reassurance and comfort of migrating to the cloud.
For end customers used to previously managing the system themselves, it gives them controlled access to investigate internal reports. They can then talk to BT about resolution.
Performance visibility through Prognosis is one of the factors that helps bolster decision making on whether to outsource to BT as a managed service provider or not.
“If they are looking at the same data, at the same time… on the same system then it gives it a lot more credence and value to the customer.”
Tim Kelly
Product Marketing BT
