Flexibility is the priority for organisations that are deploying unified communications as-a-service (UCaaS) but they’re hampered by the limitations of their networks and remote devices which are the root cause of most of the issues they face. Now, as more and more people work from home and rely on UC tools to continue to work during the COVID-19 pandemic, greater insights and understanding are needed to enable organisations to fully understand the performance of their collaboration tools and the enabling technologies.
The ability to gain intelligent insights from complex data – including a multi-vendor enterprise collaboration environment – has now become a vital requirement and organisations are deploying real-time analytics platforms to achieve this. However, this is a complex environment to analyse and customers are increasingly adopting highly dynamic and flexible approaches to their deployments, utilising a hybrid of on-premises and cloud solutions from multiple vendors and across different technology platforms.
“We’ve recently launched the next generation of our Prognosis experience management platform as hybrid cloud solution so that our customers can have flexible deployment options to gain their real-time insights,” said Kevin Ryder, the Global Chief Marketing and Product Officer at IR.
“By collecting and analysing data from multi-vendor UC environments, our customers can simplify the complexity of managing best-of-breed vendors and environments.”
IR has been using this new hybrid cloud platform to manage Cisco, Avaya and Skype for Business and has recently added Microsoft Teams capability, which is currently in IR’s beta programme. The company will also extend support to include additional UCaaS vendors such as Zoom and Cisco Webex to give customers more options.
“Our roadmap programme continues to evolve and grow, enabling us to offer our customers insights into a broader range of vendors and, through the analytics for the platform, offer them deeper insights into where they’re having potential issues,” added Ryder. “This will ensure that they can deliver a great customer experience.”
IR focuses on supporting large enterprises and UC service providers across the globe. “Our customers include some of the largest enterprises and service providers in the world,” explained Ryder. “Some of them have hundreds of thousands of users so they have to manage these complex multi-vendor environments. Even as they migrate to UCaaS vendors, such as Microsoft Teams, for example, 95% of the problems remain the same and need to be managed effectively.”
However, this is not just a challenge for large enterprises, SMBs are also utilising UCaaS and complex collaboration tools. These are often supported by service providers who can bring them enterprise grade solutions backed by the support their users need. Ryder confirmed, “The service providers need these tools to support their customers,”
“Of course, if you’re a service provider, the complexity becomes even greater because now you’re not only managing a handful of vendors, your customers might have a whole range of different vendors. The service provider environment has become highly complex, just by the nature of the size of the customer base they’re serving, which is considerable among SMBs but also includes extremely large enterprises.”
With the pandemic causing enormous changes to how and where people work, many of which will become permanent, the importance of monitoring and troubleshooting of UCaaS solutions has been highlighted. “I think quite a few employees will return to their physical workplace but we’ll see many continue to work from home. Due to this, I think the value of monitoring and troubleshooting is going to be increased substantially,” said Ryder. “We’re seeing a lot more inquiries from organisations that want to move from a reactive mode, towards a more proactive, automated approach. They’re also looking to organisations like IR for the tools to help them adapt the solutions to users that are now working from home and not from inside corporate offices. We will be introducing some very exciting new solutions over the coming months to support this changing world.”
This article was originally published on UC Today on 19 August 2020.