Keeping track of costs can be a tricky business.

Licensing, leasing, devices, hardware, voice capacity, numbering, specialised meeting room applications – the modern monthly communication and collaboration OpEx is nothing if not extensive.

Related data is often presented in different formats and spread haphazardly throughout larger enterprise organisations’ multi-vendor tech stacks. What’s more, it is subject to constant change due to staff turnover and ever-evolving technology landscapes.

Indeed, without a handle on them, increasing – or even wholly unnecessary – costs can negatively and seriously impact the bottom line. In the worst-case scenario, the return on investment in the very tools and solutions designed to deliver efficiency and profitability gains can be severely diminished by an inability to effectively manage the wider technology cost base.

It means cost and utilisation visibility is key: enabling streamlining, smarter allocation of resources, and leaner licence management.

Software smarts offer an effective solution – all enterprises must do is pick a provider partner with the product and the expertise to make it all happen.

“Enterprise organisations have rightly moved to the cloud in order to leverage the scalability and efficiency of usage-driven financial models, however that often comes with a reduction in cost transparency,” says Tim Jalland, Solution Manager at leading digital workplace management software provider VOSS Solutions, whose just-launched Cost Analytics feature provides a single point of control for discovery, analysis, trending, and reporting on asset utilisation and spending.

“Getting up to date information on costs and usage can be next to impossible. Getting the data out is technical; there’s a lot of it and it changes daily with new joiners and leavers; it’s split across cloud and on-premise systems; and it can all be in different formats, languages and currencies.

“VOSS Cost Analytics pulls the raw data in from an entire unified communications network and then makes sense of it all via an easily-understandable dashboard which displays the usage and costs of each component. Users are normally pretty surprised by what they see and, more importantly, by the immediate 10-15% savings they are able to make.”

VOSS Cost Analytics consolidates information from multiple UC components, data feeds, and applications; provides historical and real-time analysis; optimises capacity and manages day-to-day costs by reviewing estate footprints; and analyses and translates usage data into cost streams.

As well as being provided with a view of the entire UC estate, users can effortlessly drill into specific cities, offices, or departments to access local information and understand trends, and schedule usage and cost reports for senior managers and business reviews.

“We often find that a customer has a particular issue with a particular cost stream, such as phone numbers and capacity,” says Jalland.

“Perhaps they are renewing telco contracts and want to better understand their usage costs in order to inform their decision. For example, a Microsoft Teams licence is about $38 a month. If you’re a 5,000-seat organisation, that’s $40,000 a month so you want to be sure about utilisation levels before making a commitment.

“We have also been working with a large consulting company interested in estate rationalisation and understanding individual office location costs. We’re working with them on slightly different dashboards that meet their particular use case requirements. The capabilities are there to address all customer needs and we are hugely excited by the immense potential.

“Early adopters have embraced VOSS Cost Analytics to understand and analyse calling behaviour, numbering, and capacity requirements at different locations, resulting in substantial and immediate savings, often amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The aim is to empower organisations to achieve cost savings across as wide a spectrum as possible.”

To learn more about how VOSS Solutions can help your business leverage the benefits of Cost Analytics, click here.



from UC Today https://ift.tt/wjSh4Wm