As a longtime provider of third-party Unified Communications monitoring tools, IR gets asked one question regularly: Why choose 3rd-party tools over built-in vendor tools?
According to Mark McPake, Collaborate Product Manager at IR, there's one basic difference between third-party and vendor tools: confirmational bias.
"Vendors create tools to show that their system works, whereas third-party providers develop tools to locate problems and help fix them," he explains.
The larger a business is, the more complex it is to monitor. While small companies using a single UC platform might do fine without such services, they become crucial when it comes to complex multi-vendor environments. That's where solution providers like IR come in: helping businesses identify UC performance issues quickly, get to the bottom of them, and promote swift resolutions.
As IR launches Version 13 of its monitoring tools, including IR Collaborate for UC environments, we discussed monitoring challenges of modern businesses, the benefits of third-party tools, and key upgrades included in the new release.
UC Communication Issues: A Daily Challenge
IR's extensive analysis of bad voice experiences shows a greater business impact than one might assume: On average, over 90% of users have daily communication issues. And as small as these issues may sometimes be, if they annoy the customer enough, the business might end up losing them as a result.
"If voice, video, or any other communication channel are core to one's business, then it's a critical infrastructure aspect they should look after," McPake says.
Third-Party Monitoring: Deeper Data, Quicker Resolutions
What customers often lack when using vendor monitoring tools is more data. While these tools provide a certain level of data, it usually isn't enough.
"A big part of our job is seeing where we can collect more data, and we collect hundreds of data points from various systems within any ecosystem," McPake shares.
However, it’s what IR does with the data that makes all the difference: They're all about digging deeper, truly getting to the bottom of complex communication problems, and solving them as easily and quickly as possible.
"Our biggest focus is on the way our users experience their problems, identify them, and solve them," he says.
IR incorporates data from a variety of sources – multiple vendor tools, devices and endpoints, networks, session boarder controllers and more – in one place. It then analyzes the information and provides practical insights to streamline problem solving and improve efficiency.
"If I looked at a session in our tool, it would tell me straight away if there were issues within the session and which user they came from," McPake explains. "Otherwise, IT could be wasting time on an issue that they can't solve."
IR can highlight the issues and pinpoint the source, but more importantly, they're able to tell IT teams whether a problem is in the realm of their control or not; and if it is, what they can do to solve it.
"It could be my Wi-Fi at home, for example, in which case I can do something about that, but my company can't, and simply knowing that can help time-poor IT teams focus their efforts where they will have the most impact," McPake notes.
The Ever-Growing Complexity of a Multi-Vendor Market
IR monitors various aspects of the UC environment, such as the critical infrastructure, the network itself, and related hardware. However, the 'experience' aspect is where things become more complex.
"Experience issues today are very similar to the ones we had 15 years ago, but the difference now is, the complexity is 100 times bigger," McPake notes.
"With numerous vendors with different country standards who have to meet different rules and regulations, there's much more involved in trying to make that experience manageable."
