You’ve packed your technology stack with the tools to drive stellar engagement.
You’ve integrated with Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, Zoom, or any one of the plethora of powerful unified platforms now at the heart of the modern enterprise communication ecosystem.
Thing is, your connectivity may depend on different providers in multiple geographical territories; your offices may be many in number and located around the world; and your hundreds (or thousands) of end points may be scattered far and wide.
How can you be certain it is all functioning as it should? Who tells your central IT team if something goes down? And how do you swiftly diagnose and fix the problem?
Seeing it all and – just as importantly – constantly stress testing it all is crucial. For those enterprises and their technology service providers, partnering with experts is key.
“Enterprises derive huge value from providing a UC platform that empowers a geographically- dispersed workforce to collaborate seamlessly across locations; however, that places the onus on IT departments to ensure smooth operations on a global and local scale – the effective management, monitoring, and control of the entire infrastructure is therefore essential,” says Tim Jalland, Solution Manager at leading digital workplace management software provider VOSS Solutions, whose Insights performance analysis platform delivers on all fronts.
“The UC landscape is complex. Increasingly, the focal point of these solutions revolves around a unified cloud platform such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, or Zoom, offering a spectrum of features including calling, video conferencing, messaging, meetings, and file sharing.
In practice, this core is complemented by a myriad of other elements within the corporate infrastructure, internet infrastructure, and home networks of remote workers, to form a comprehensive solution. It’s crucial that the entire UC stack delivers the uninterrupted benefits it has promised.”
In the case of VOSS Solutions, ‘Full Stack Observability’ is provided by single-pane-of-glass analytics functionality, presented via clear and easy-to-understand reporting dashboards, and supported by smart 24/7 synthetic testing – the deployment of BOTs into regional sites and offices to simulate and measure user activity.
For example, is connectivity being maintained everywhere? How long is it taking to join a Microsoft Teams meeting? Are all business-critical phones ringing when they should?
In the event of an issue, the solution triggers a response procedure configured against certain thresholds – logging the condition, raising an alert, sending a notification, or taking a specific self-healing configuration action.
As well as enhancing user experience and adoption rates across the piece, the solution monitors and evaluates service availability in accordance with agreed SLAs; drastically reduces the time required to pinpoint and rectify issues; supplies actionable business analytics and insights; and streamlines complexity, minimizes ownership costs, and alleviates resource strain.
“We are enabling our customers to be permanently on the front foot,” says Jalland.
“Not relying on after-the-event alerts or poor end user feedback. Operators and vendors often provide very limited visibility into their service. For example, if you have a problem with your broadband, you can go on to an operator site and it will tell you if there is an outage, but it won’t provide much additional information. You have to raise a ticket and wait for a response.
“Better to move away from the multitude of silo’d management portals that support each element of the multi-vendor collaboration solution, to a single portal with a global, end-to-end view supported by a flexible data acquisition engine.”
In the case of telephony in particular, the synthetic testing element of that data acquisition can be invaluable.
Many organisations remain highly dependent on voice communications, both internal and external. Indeed, communicating via voice as opposed to messaging suggests there is an urgency to a situation.
“A customer or colleague sending an organisation a message or an email usually means they do not expect an instantaneous response, but the opposite is often the case with a voice call,” says Jalland.
“For many businesses, voice is still the number one communication channel. That makes 24/7 uptime a top priority, and constant testing an absolute imperative. More widely, the bar for UC platform performance as a whole is rightly set high by users – matching or, better still, exceeding expectations can have a significantly positive impact on every aspect of an organisation’s constant drive for enhanced efficiency and productivity.”
- To learn more about how VOSS Solutions can help your and your customers’ businesses benefit from Full Stack Observability, click here.
