The move toward automated processes is sweeping across the IT world, not least in unified communications – where overworked engineers want to relinquish repetitive tasks to concentrate on strategic projects.
A UC provisioning automation platform can minimize manual work, mitigate the chance of service disruptions and outages, ensure consistency across MACDs and minimize licensing costs.
Akkadian Labs has highlighted seven automation building blocks within its flagship Provisioning Manager product that, when put together, can deliver businesses true UC provisioning automation.
The seven elements demonstrate how adding different components together provides more value for a business and reduce UC engineers’ workloads.
The pick 'n' mix approach means organizations can choose only the components that are relevant to their communications workflow.
Many organizations, for example, will not need multi-vendor support but can still achieve full automation by utilizing the other blocks.
"We've seen from our customers that this is not a single path," David Levy, Director of Marketing at Akkadian, told UC Today.
"Organisations can implement these steps in different orders, and we actually encourage our customers to roll out different types of automation in whatever order makes sense to them."
UC Today has expanded on each of the seven building blocks below.
Cross-Application Workflows
Cross-application workflow is the core component of UC automation and provides the foundation for the rest of the building blocks.
This allows UC engineers to handle moves, adds, changes, and deletes for multiple applications in one go – removing the need to re-enter the same information several times to provision phone numbers, voicemail, meeting applications, etc.
Cross-application workflow can dramatically reduce the time it takes UC engineers to carry out mundane tasks from minutes to seconds.
Akkadian integrates tightly with leading UC vendors so that any task that can be carried out in the platforms can be done quicker and more accurately in Akkadian Provisioning Manager.
Multiple Servers and Clusters
Large enterprises with tens of thousands of employees will often have users distributed worldwide. This makes provisioning complex, to the point where even some provisioning platforms from leading UC vendors do not have the functionality to automate across clusters. This is the case for Cisco Prime Collaboration Provisioning, which has been announced as End-of Life.
Service management platforms, however, can do this – relieving UC engineers of tricky tasks.
Multi-Vendor Support
Multi-vendor support expands on the initial cross-application workflow stage to incorporate UC platforms from more than one provider.
Many businesses will not need this because they've standardized with one supplier. Still, some will find themselves with several UC estates, perhaps through the acquisition of a business that uses a different vendor. There will also be some businesses that have adopted a cloud-based product like Microsoft Teams to run alongside their existing communications infrastructure.
