The growing worldwide adoption of remote working as a result of COVID-19 is unquestionably the main driver of major changes in the way we work.
Much of the world has shifted their practices to working from home and relying on technology to stay in touch with colleagues and customers. Many (if not most) companies have been forced to review their IT strategies as a top priority, emphasizing the importance of adopting the right cloud-based collaboration tools, like Microsoft Teams.
Single vendor solution or “best-of-breed”?
One of the key considerations for organizations deploying communication and collaboration solutions is the architectural perspective. Should you deploy one solution for all UCC needs or select “best-of-breed” for individual components such as voice, video conferencing, contact center and team collaboration?
Wainhouse Research data shows that in 2018, 76% of organizations chose to deploy single vendor solutions. But in 2020, there has been a complete swing – showing that 76% of organizations now prefer to deploy best-of-breed solutions to drive their communication technology decisions.
While this cross-vendor, cross-platform approach gives organizations the flexibility to meet their specific requirements and allow users globally to work and collaborate efficiently, it adds significantly more complexity to already complex UCC environments.
Teams-work
There’s no doubt that cloud collaboration platforms have made business continuity possible amidst country-wide lockdowns and closed boarders. And as part of the Microsoft Office 365 suite, Microsoft Teams has proven to be one of the most popular collaboration tools of choice for enterprise organizations in the shift to remote working.
But many still want, or need, to hold on to some aspects of their existing on-premises UC systems.
Deploying multiple UC solutions also means multiple admin and management tools, and this is a major challenge facing many organizations. If IT teams have to use each individual tool for each solution to find the problem, it could take hours, or even days to resolve. This of course means downtime, negative user experience and ultimately loss of revenue.
As UC environments become more complex, monitoring, troubleshooting, service health and success metrics are vital.
Third-party performance management tools provide complete management visibility from a single viewpoint across complex hybrid UC environments, enabling proactive monitoring, troubleshooting, and alerting to issues across the UC ecosystem. This makes it far easier to quickly resolve issues before they become so widespread that they impact productivity and user experience.
New support for Microsoft Teams
IR recently launched their new vendor support for Microsoft Teams. With this experience management solution you can access:
- Call quality data within minutes
- Alerting on many important metrics – with both out-of-the-box and customizable options
- Intuitive, user friendly dashboards – again both out-of-the-box and customizable
- Granular, comprehensive drilldowns to identify and remedy root-cause
- Greater context with the ability to correlate data across different metrics for deeper insight
- Flexible deployment options to monitor Teams via a pure cloud or hybrid solution
- Multi-vendor visibility across your environments, not just within Teams
Whether choosing single vendor or best-of-breed solutions, on-premise or in cloud, third-party UC performance management tools, like IR’s, are all about simplifying complexity and can help organizations transition to Teams, drive adoption and usage, and ensure ongoing success.
