Understanding The Technology – Keeping Up With Change
In recent years, necessity and innovation have fundamentally changed the identity of Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) forever.
Not only has the market grown, it has also diversified. As it continues to do so to keep up with the needs and demands of users, the inherent complexity of these ecosystems is increasing exponentially.
It’s this complexity that makes UC&C monitoring and performance management a necessity to ensure these tools work, particularly in large enterprise organizations.
The Evolving UC&C Landscape
In line with the fast-paced and location-diverse nature of today’s workplace culture, UC&C tools and applications have changed the way we do business.
They enable large enterprise organizations to enhance productivity, streamline operations and foster effective collaboration in a way that we scarcely would have dreamed possible a decade ago.
But the complicated task of managing these ever-evolving tools and platforms, changing regulations, and shifting compliance requirements would be all but impossible without the implementation of dedicated monitoring and performance management solutions.
So, what’s changed?
In the past five years, UC&C has redefined itself through technological advancements, changing work environments and shifting user expectations.
Here’s how far UC&C has come in just those few short years.
1. Integration with Third-Party Applications
UC&C solutions were often siloed, and integration options were limited, leading to fragmented workflows and communication inconsistencies.
Today: With the advent of global diversification, modern UC&C platforms can now integrate with a wide range of third-party applications and services, such as CRM systems, project management tools, and social media platforms. This creates unified workflows and enhances productivity by seamlessly allowing the use of different tools.
2. Transition to Cloud-Based Solutions and MSPs
UC&C solutions were often on-premises, requiring significant investment in hardware, software and maintenance, as well dedicated on-premise IT administrative teams.
Today: A major shift to cloud-based SaaS offerings, and UC&C platforms like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Cisco Webex Meetings has offered scalability, and flexibility without the need for clunky on-site infrastructure. Additionally, the rise of the Managed Service Provider (MSP) sector has alleviated much of the heavy lifting within an organization’s IT infrastructure.
3. Switched Focus to Remote/Hybrid Work and Mobility
UC&C tools and platforms were designed for in-office environments but had limited support for mobile or remote work.
Today: The pandemic accelerated the need for robust, mobile-first UC&C solutions, which are now built to support a hybrid work environment. Seamless experiences across platforms allows users to switch between desktop and mobile with losing functionality. Features like virtual whiteboards, breakout rooms, and asynchronous collaboration tools service both in-office and remote workers. This shift has enabled team cohesion in distributed workforces and the ability to maintain productivity.
4. The Evolution of Video Conferencing
Before the pandemic, video conferencing was often a separate, specialized tool with basic functionality and inconsistent reliability.
Today: Video conferencing is a core component of UC&C platforms, and the improvements in functionality brought about from necessity have seen the development of advanced features including HD video, virtual backgrounds, AI-enhanced features, and support for large-scale webinars. Tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams have redefined how businesses conduct meetings, making video communication more accessible and integral to daily operations.
5. User Experience and Personalization
UC&C platforms had a one-size-fits-all approach, with limited customization options for users.
Today: A dispersed workforce has caused businesses to focus much more on user experience. After all, a consistently bad user experience leads to diminished productivity and efficiency, dissatisfaction and even resignation. Today’s working platforms allow personalized dashboards, customizable workflows, and user-specific settings, to tailor interfaces and functionalities to a user’s specific needs.
6. Unification of Messaging
Messaging, email, and voice communications were usually handled through separate platforms, meaning that communication experiences were often disjointed.
Today: Unified messaging combines chat, email, voice, and video communications into a single platform, allowing for a seamless and integrated communication experience. Tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and others offer channels, threads, and direct messages all in one place, simplifying communication.
7. Improved Collaboration Analytics
Collaboration data was less measurable, with limited tools to analyze team interactions or productivity.
Today: UC&C platforms today include analytics tools that provide insights into collaboration patterns, user engagement, and productivity metrics. Being able to study these insights enables organizations to optimize communication strategies and improve team performance.
Managing and Scaling Large Enterprise Collaboration is Hard
With literally thousands of points of failure within a large collaboration environment, the need for advanced management strategies is mission-critical. But it’s impossible to manage what you can’t monitor and measure.
The implementation of enterprise-grade monitoring and performance management tools has soared to the top of the priority list for organizations. Without the right solutions, organizations face millions of minutes of lost productivity and an inability to navigate the rising complexity of their UC&C ecosystem.
Navigating Challenges in the UC&C Environment
UC&C environments today are a web of complexity with dispersed workforces, multiple devices and applications, new and legacy systems and much more to contend with. But there are also technological, organizational, security, and user-related issues, and they all require robust management strategies to address them.
The Complexity of Integration
Integrating all of an organization’s communication tools and platforms into a compatible UC&C environment can be a mammoth task, especially when dealing with legacy systems or diverse third-party applications.
IT departments are constantly facing unprecedented challenges to facilitate onboarding, training, and support for location-agnostic employees. This creates various levels of complexity.
The Solution: By using APIs and middleware, organizations can create a cohesive and solid bridge between diverse technologies, tools and databases, integrating them into a seamless unified system. This also enables businesses to innovate faster and addresses the issues of siloed systems. Integrated monitoring solutions can track system health in real time and create customized alerts to quickly identify any issues.
Scalability Issues
Enterprises strive for growth, but as technology continues to evolve at speed, UC&C needs can also change rapidly. This requires organizations to have efficient scaling strategies.
Poor scalability (or the inability to keep up with change) can lead to performance issues and service interruptions. This in turn can affect customer fulfilment and satisfaction, employee experience, result in missed deadlines and opportunities, and even a breakdown in company morale.
The Solution: Most cloud-based UC&C solutions offer great flexibility and scalability. Properly implemented and managed cloud platforms can handle increased loads to accommodate long and short-term growth without compromising performance. By carefully monitoring adoption, usage, and performance, organizations can plan for future growth.
Network Performance
Continuous and seamless network performance is mission-critical for any organization’s UC&C services. Poor connectivity, latency, jitter or bandwidth issues seriously impacts the quality of communication and collaboration.
Application unavailability and service disruptions in the quality of voice and video connections can lead to poor customer satisfaction, loss of revenue, wasted time – and negatively impacts your organization as a whole.
The Solution: You can optimize your network infrastructure by appropriately adjusting your Quality of Service (QoS) settings to prioritize UC&C data. By working with service providers, you can always ensure that there is sufficient bandwidth. Robust monitoring tools will detect unexpected network traffic spikes and create proactive alerts so issues can be addressed before they escalates.
User Experience
Many organizations come to the realization that their UC&C solutions may not properly support their employees’ needs and capabilities.
For collaboration to be effective, users need to have a good experience with their tools and feel comfortable with the applications, devices and software they’re using. The process of training and support must be ongoing. And needs should be regularly reevaluated to ensure solutions are still fit for purpose.
The solution: By monitoring user experience, IT professionals can see how users interact with their tools, and what pain points they might be experiencing. Tracking metrics like Mean Opinion Score (MOS), adoption, logged tickets, and dropped calls can help give insights into the quality of user experience and overall UC&C performance.
Vendor Management
Relying solely on a single UC&C vendor can lead to vendor lock-in, limiting flexibility and making it difficult to switch providers or integrate with other systems.
As UC&C tools become more sophisticated and diverse, organizations are selecting best of breed tools that suit specific requirements, rather than a single-vendor option. However, the challenge is managing all these systems, multiple vendors and product lifecycles from one vantage point.
The solution: Third-party monitoring and performance management tools offer a wide range of functionalities tailored to meet the specific needs of organizations with diverse, complex, and multi-vendor UC&C environments. The most advanced tools provide a single pane of glass through which multiple issues can be viewed, monitored, and managed from one place.
The Business Impact of Poor UC&C Management
Today’s IT teams are tasked with managing increasingly complicated UC&C environments, while also contending with external factors like regulatory and compliance pressures.
Organizations who don’t have the systems in place to effectively manage all these moving parts run the risk of falling victim to several significant business impacts.
1. Increased operational costs
The frequent troubleshooting, maintenance and patching required to mitigate a poorly managed UC&C systems can drive up IT costs. It can add to project timelines and divert resources away from more important strategic initiatives, increasing overall operational costs.
2. Decreased productivity
Frequent dropped calls, poor video quality, and network interruptions disrupt workflow and stop employees from being able to do their job effectively. Struggling with unreliable communication tools hinders collaboration and slows down decision-making.
3. Poor employee morale and engagement
Frequent technical issues or disruptions can create stress, frustration, and reduce confidence in the tools meant to streamline collaboration. This frustration can lead to disengagement, as employees struggle to stay motivated and connected with their teams.
4. Inefficient decision-making
Effective communication and collaboration, including information-sharing are critical for timely decision-making. Miscommunication, and a lack of alignment among teams, slows down the decision-making process.
Unreliable UC&C tools make it difficult to hold productive meetings or quickly disseminate important information, leading to missed opportunities and slow responses to market changes.
5. Reputational damage
An organization’s reputation takes a long time to build. But poor UC&C experiences can quickly undo positive sentiment.
Frequent system outages, dropped calls, or poor video quality reflect poorly on professionalism, especially during customer interactions, important meetings, or public-facing events and can affect relationships with partners, suppliers, customers and employees.
6. Loss of business opportunities
Whether it’s a delayed response to a sales inquiry or a failure to act quickly on a strategic initiative, the impact of missed communications can affect a business severely. Slow response times and poor collaboration can result in losing a potential client to more responsive competitors.
7. Compliance Risks
Many industries are subject to strict regulatory requirements regarding communication standards and data handling. Without proper oversight, sensitive communications may not be adequately secured or monitored, increasing the likelihood of data breaches or unauthorized access.
Additionally, when employees use unapproved or unsecured tools due to frustration with poorly managed systems, it creates shadow IT risks that bypass compliance protocols altogether.
Trends Driving IT Investment in UC&C
The road ahead for UC&C in large enterprise is signposted by several emergent trends and advancements. These are driven by evolving technology and workforce dynamics as well as the non-negotiable demand for secure, seamless, integrated solutions.
The Role of AI and ML
There is no escaping the prevalence of AI and machine learning (ML) in modern tech.
Not only are organizations prioritizing UC&C tools that leverage AI to enhance productivity and user experience, with features like real-time transcription and intelligent meeting scheduling to streamlining workflows and improve efficiency.
But they are looking for ways to leverage AI and ML to improve the management of their UC&C environments to help with everything from advanced data analytics to predictive and remedial capabilities to capacity planning and more.
Focus on Security and Compliance
As communication tools handle increasingly sensitive information, IT leaders are investing in UC&C platforms with advanced security measures. End-to-end encryption, robust access controls, and compliance with data protection regulations are critical for safeguarding business-critical communications.
The Evolving Work Landscape
With hybrid, remote, multi-site, flexible, work arrangements the norm for many enterprise organizations, the focus on experience is a significant driving force behind IT investment.
Distributed teams must stay seamlessly connected to ensure productivity, those in customer-facing roles must be able to offer excellent customer experiences regardless of their location, and tools must work to maximize adoption and return on investments.
Simplifying UC&C Complexity for Large Enterprise
Deploying a multi-vendor UC&C monitoring solution is paramount to address potential issues across disparate platforms before they escalate and severely impact business operations.
Interoperability between communication platforms is crucial to enable seamless integrations, minimize disruptions, and prevent compatibility issues. Regularly assessing the performance and reliability of platforms through comprehensive monitoring enables organizations to stay ahead of technological advancements, security threats, and respond more positively to user feedback.
This proactive approach enables timely adjustments and optimizations, ensuring that the communication ecosystem remains robust, responsive, and tailored to the evolving UC&C needs of large enterprise organizations.
Key Takeaways
UC&C Complexity Isn’t Going Away:
As the UC&C market grows and diversifies, managing the complexity of these systems becomes critical. Monitoring and performance management are essential to ensure seamless functionality, particularly in large enterprises.
Technological Advancements:
UC&C tools have evolved significantly in recent years, with key changes including cloud-based solutions, integration with third-party applications, mobile- first designs, and the unification of communication channels like messaging, email, voice, and video. They will continue to advance and organizations must be equipped to keep pace with the rate of change, or risk being left behind.
Business Impacts of Poor UC&C Management:
Poor UC&C management can lead to increased operational costs, decreased productivity, poor morale, reputational damage, and even compliance risks, all of which negatively affect business outcomes.
Trends Shaping IT Investments:
Key trends driving IT investments in UC&C include AI and machine learning for improved productivity and management, a strong focus on security and compliance, and the ongoing shift towards supporting remote and hybrid workforces.
The Need for Enterprise-Grade Monitoring:
With thousands of potential failure points in large UC&C environments, advanced monitoring solutions are necessary. These tools enable organizations to track system health in real time, manage performance, and prevent costly disruptions.
