IR has worked with Wainhouse Research to produce a thought leadership and insight report on the enterprise benefits from monitoring, analytics, diagnostics, and optimization of workplace communications and collaboration — also known as performance and experience management. Download the full e-book here – https://info.ir.com/wainhouse-report.

Over the past 10 years, new collaborative tools and technologies have drastically altered the way we think about remote work. During this time there has been a gradual, global job renaissance, and a subtle dismantling of the traditional, centralized workplace.  

But the trend towards remote work became supercharged in March 2020 with the onset of COVID-19, making remote working no longer an option, but a necessity.  

With this change comes huge complexity in the UC environment, so today we’ll help simplify and demystify some of the challenges and reveal how to streamline UC for a greater user experience in the digital world. 

You can’t fix what you can’t see 

In today’s remote working environment, the most important consideration is ensuring 100% uptime of team collaboration. You can forget about face-to-face meetings in the foreseeable future, so it’s crucial that networks, devices, applications, and people are all functioning at optimal capacity. The only way is management and monitoring tools.  

Most network providers, UCC platform vendors and device manufacturers supply their own ‘out-of-the-box’ monitoring and performance management tools. However, this poses problems when most organizations use multiple telecom providers, a variety of video conferencing and calling solutions and a wide array of devices. When this is all connected by network devices from various vendors deployed within data centers across multiple clouds – you can imagine the headaches when each component has their own administration tool! It could take literally days to find the source of a problem, leading to serious downtime, negative user experience and ultimately a loss of revenue. 

Research shows that about a third of enterprises have no monitoring or performance management tools in place, a third have single vendor tools (out–of–the–box) and a third use third-party tools. This means that only a third have true end to end visibility of their entire UC ecosystem in a multi-vendor, hybrid environment,  

The transition from managed network traffic (within the traditional work environment) to unmanaged network traffic, i.e. home networks, unreliable broadband connections, mobile data etc. poses massive challenges for IT teams trying to keep their organizations connected. 

“With people being forced to work from home, they’re no longer being monitored on their own company networks. They’re using the internet and switching to mobile networks, which makes the monitoring all that much more difficult.”- Steve MacGregor, Global Digital Workplace Director, BT

Technology users become accustomed to a certain level of functionality in their private communication tools and applications. With communication taking place outside of the normal workplace, and with people widely scattered, there is a heightened expectation that things should work properly, every time. But often incompatible headsets and mobile devices, and unreliable network connections, the threat of security and data breaches, the pressure on IT teams is growing, so monitoring needs to work.  

Familiarity breeds content 

With so many people feeling displaced and thrown into an unfamiliar communications environment, familiarity and ease of use is a top consideration in the workplace. They want communication tools that are easy to use and understand.  

The two top UC contenders, Zoom and Microsoft Teams, have a majority share of the video conferencing market. While they are supposedly easy to use, many people forced to work in this newer, stranger environment might not necessarily have sufficient training in how to use these apps properly. This poses a potential increase in security challenges. 

The benefits of proactive UC management solutions 

Nobody can dispute the importance of the role of IT in an organization. However, without network monitoring and troubleshooting tools in place, their role is largely a reactive process. Troubleshooting happens after the fact. Once an outage or a network failure, bad quality video, dropped connection or a security breach has happened, it’s up to IT teams to find the problem and fix it as soon as possible.  

Real–time monitoring on the other hand, is proactive. From a data and analytics viewpoint, you’re able to solve problems immediately, and even predict problems by establishing user patterns. This creates consistency of user experience, quality of connectivity – and all-important solution management information.  

With the proper third-party tools to provide end-to-end visibility and analysis, IT can rapidly identify and resolve incidents before they become widespread and create serious productivity-impacting events. 

Real–time analysis is the goose that lays the golden egg 

Third–party monitoring tools give you unparalleled visibility into your entire UC ecosystem. Real–time analysis provides the mining of data and analytics – the most valuable UC management asset for any organization. It reveals vital information that provides: 

  • An assurance of network quality and connectivity
  • Proactive monitoring, troubleshooting across multiple platforms including UC, meeting, and contact center, on-premises, in cloud or hybrid
  • Root cause isolation of voice and video quality issues
  • SBC & SIP monitoring and troubleshooting with insights into configuration, operation, and performance
  • Analytics and reporting for trend spotting, critical troubleshooting and solution management information
  • Experience validation testing, and an outside-in performance and load testing

For more insights on UC performance management in these increasingly complex times, download this free eBook from Wainhouse Research, Managing Complexity in Complex Times – https://info.ir.com/wainhouse-report.

 

 

 



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