IT leaders don’t dispute the strategic importance of collaboration platforms. What they do dispute, often in board meetings with CFOs asking the challenging enquiries, is the return on that investment.
Despite UC being mission-critical, many enterprises still lack the tools to answer basic questions: How many of our licenses are actually in use? Where is service performance slipping before users complain? How do we prove we’re meeting SLAs? And critically, are we laying the operational groundwork to bring in AI capabilities like Microsoft Copilot?
These blind spots are not trivial. They lead directly to overspend, degraded employee experience, reactive incident management, and a lack of confidence in IT’s ability to quantify value. Worse, the reliance on service providers for basic visibility leaves many organisations dependent on external actors to inform them about how their own environment is performing.
VOSS customers are choosing an alternative path; to take back control. With unified UC analytics, targeted optimisation and automation, enterprises can manage their collaboration platforms with the same rigour as any other core IT system; reducing waste, protecting service quality, and creating the baseline for AI adoption.
Step 1: Shine a Light on Usage, Costs and User Experience
The first step to regaining control is clarity. Organisations cannot optimise what they cannot see. Too often, enterprises lack a single source of truth across their existing on premise systems, Teams, Webex, Zoom and other platforms. Data is scattered across vendor dashboards or obscured by service providers who control access to usage reports, making it almost impossible for IT leaders to understand the full picture.
That lack of visibility has tangible costs. In one multinational with more than 100,000 employees across 40 countries, VOSS’ analysis of 15 million call detail records uncovered 17,000 inactive licenses, thousands of dormant devices, and over 40 percent of mailboxes unused. Eliminating that waste unlocked significant budget for other priorities.
Similarly, without monitoring real-world call quality or meeting performance, CIOs cannot determine whether employees are being hindered by degraded service until complaints accumulate.
With consolidated UC analytics, enterprises gain immediate transparency into who is using what, how services are performing, and what the actual employee experience looks like. This visibility enables leaders to align costs to business demand, identify underused assets, and track user sentiment before issues harden into dissatisfaction. In essence, visibility elevates guesswork into data-driven decision-making.
Step 2: Turn Insights into Targeted Improvements
Visibility alone doesn’t deliver outcomes; it must be translated into action. Once enterprises uncover where costs are leaking or performance is slipping, they can make targeted improvements that provide measurable results.
Take license optimisation, for example. With a clear view of usage, IT leaders can right-size entitlements, reassign dormant accounts, and rationalise overlapping subscriptions. This reduces spend without compromising access. On the performance front, service monitoring can highlight specific choke points, such as recurring latency in particular regions or degraded call quality on certain endpoints. Armed with that intelligence, IT can intervene before service degradation spreads.
Focused improvements also result in faster and more consistent incident response. Instead of waiting for a service provider to investigate, businesses with internal visibility can quickly pinpoint root causes, resolve issues within SLA windows, and restore employee productivity with minimal disruption. In industries where downtime costs millions per hour, the value of that speed is immense.
The difference when visibility is restored is stark. A city government agency that replaced Cisco’s legacy UC Domain Manager with VOSS technology reported faster incident resolution, zero-touch workflows, and devolved admin rights via a secure business portal. Instead of waiting on external providers, IT teams could detect and resolve issues before they escalated, maintaining user experience and service reliability.
By transitioning from reactive firefighting to proactive optimisation, organisations not only save money but also strengthen employee trust in IT, reinforce compliance commitments, and maintain smooth collaboration across geographies and teams.
Step 3: Automate for Sustainable Gains — and a Platform for AI
Sustainable service management depends on more than visibility and targeted interventions. Enterprises must ensure improvements stick, and that means automation. Manual monitoring, capacity planning, and service request handling are too slow and too resource-intensive for today’s dynamic environments.
Automating license reclamation, for instance, ensures dormant accounts are consistently captured and reallocated. Automated monitoring of UC performance flags degradations before users notice, enabling IT to act pre-emptively. Service request automation eliminates bottlenecks by routing and resolving routine actions promptly, allowing skilled staff to concentrate on strategic initiatives.
Crucially, automation establishes a reliable operational baseline. That’s what makes it possible to introduce AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot with confidence. AI thrives on high-quality data and stable processes.
Enterprises that first optimise and automate their UC environments are better positioned to harness AI for tasks ranging from real-time meeting transcription to intelligent workflow orchestration. In this sense, proactive UC management is not just about saving money today, but about equipping for the productivity leaps of tomorrow.
Taking Back Control
Enterprises are at a crossroads. They can continue to live with opaque costs, unpredictable performance, and reactive incident management. Or they can reclaim control of their UC destiny, with full visibility, targeted optimisation, and automation as standard practice.
Those who choose the latter will not only cut waste and reduce service risk but will also create a resilient platform for the AI-powered future of work.
That is where VOSS comes in. VOSS’s service management platform equips enterprises with the analytics, control and automation they need to align UC operations with business priorities. By uncovering hidden waste, maintaining service performance, and automating repetitive tasks, VOSS enables organisations to take back control of their collaboration environments (and their budgets).
Run a UC visibility audit today with VOSS and uncover the quick wins waiting inside your existing platforms. Find out more here.
