What To Expect
Unified Communications should be a seamless experience. People join meetings without drama, calls sound crisp, and messaging “just works”. When it does not, the fallout is immediate. Employees lose time, leaders lose patience, and IT teams lose hours to reactive troubleshooting.
That is why Service Management & Connectivity has become a buyer topic, not just an ops topic. It is the behind-the-scenes layer that helps enterprises run UC like a real service, with clear ownership, fast fixes, and a reliable connection to the outside world.
It also helps IT leaders explain value to the wider buying committee, especially when the cost of downtime is so hard to ignore. One industry benchmark suggests the cost of hourly IT downtime exceeds $300,000 for 90% of firms.
Whether your interest is IT service management or the network connectivity which keeps meetings reliable, this guide is written for the people who feel that pressure most. UC and collaboration owners. Network and infrastructure teams. Enterprise architects. And the IT leaders who have to justify spending while keeping the business moving.
If you want to explore related topics while reading, UC Today has a growing hub dedicated to this space: Service Management & Connectivity.
Lets dive in. Here are the key questions we’ll be answering:
- What Is Service Management & Connectivity?
- What is the plain English explanation of Service Management & Connectivity?
- What is the Cost of Inaction?
- How Does Service Management & Connectivity Technology Work?
- How Do UC Outages and Poor Call Quality Affect the Bottom Line?
- How Does Service Management & Connectivity Solve UC Outages and Poor Call Quality?
- What are The Trends Reshaping UC Service Management & Connectivity in 2026?
- How do I Choose the Right Vendor Tool?
- What is the Best Way to Evaluate a Service Management & Connectivity Vendor?
- How do I Implement Service Management & Connectivity?
- What Happens After the Deployment of Service Management & Connectivity Tools?
- How Do I Track and Prove the ROI of Service Management & Connectivity Purchases?
- What is the Future of Service Management & Connectivity?
- FAQs
What Is Service Management & Connectivity?
In a UC context, Service Management & Connectivity is about making sure communication tools actually work, all the time, for everyone who needs them.
It is easiest to understand it as two closely connected layers:
- IT service management (ITSM) is how you run UC as a service. It includes workflow optimization, automation, managing migrations from legacy systems to the cloud, and reducing downtime. It also increasingly includes monitoring the performance of automated systems, not just humans.
- Enterprise connectivity in the UC world is less about LAN or WiFi, and more about the “application layer” connection that delivers telephone calls, meetings, and video calls to the outside world. This includes visibility and diagnostics for enterprise communications, external calling reach such as trunks and carrier services, and end-to-end observability across those paths.
If you want extra context, take a look at what market experts and analysts are saying about the technology:
Service Management & Connectivity in Plain English
If you are on the buying committee and you do not have an IT background, here is the simplest way to think about it.
Service management is how your organization responds when someone says:
“My calls keep dropping” or “Meetings are glitchy” or “Nobody knows who owns this issue”.
It is the difference between:
- a fast, predictable fix with clear communication, and
- a slow blame loop where four teams investigate the same issue in four different tools.
Connectivity is how those calls and meetings reach the outside world. Internal chat and internal meetings can be fairly self-contained. External calling is different. The moment your UC platform needs to connect customers, partners, suppliers, or the public phone network, you rely on a chain of services and routes that need monitoring and management.
This is why the two topics matter together. Connectivity issues without service management become expensive chaos. Service management without connectivity visibility becomes well-organized guesswork.
Is there a buyer’s guide that compares service management and connectivity solutions for unified communications?
Yes. This guide is designed to do exactly that. It is also written with a practical bias: you do not need more dashboards. You need fewer surprises, faster resolution, and an operating model that scales.
What is the Cost of Inaction?
One thing stands out when it comes to service management and connectivity – enterprises can’t afford to leave them “for later”. Here are 4 incidents that demonstrate why an urgent upgrade might be necessary.
In 2017, Equifax failed to patch its network after being alerted to a security vulnerability in its consumer database. This allowed hackers to gain access to personally identifiable information, including Social Security numbers.
Once this breach had been discovered and investigated, the financial firm agreed to pay at least $575 million in a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and other regulatory bodies.
In Europe, TSB bank updated its IT systems, undergoing a complex IT change management program. But it experienced significant technical failures – resulting in disruption to branch, mobile, and web banking. As a result, 5.4 million customers were affected.
As a consequence of its IT migration failings and insufficient governance, TSB was fined nearly £30 million by the Financial Conduct Authority and over £18 million by the Prudential Regulation Authority.
How Does Service Management & Connectivity Technology Work?
Most enterprises can picture their UC stack as a set of layers. You do not need to be technical to follow the logic.
At the top you have the UC platform. That is what users interact with. Below that you have the services that connect UC to the outside world. And around that, you need monitoring and workflows so issues get diagnosed and resolved quickly.
Here is what that looks like in practice:
1) UC platforms and endpoints
Your meetings, calling, messaging, and the devices people use: laptops, phones, headsets, and meeting room systems.
2) External calling and real-time communication paths
Carrier services, call routing, and the components that help calls connect reliably beyond your organization. Many enterprises also use tools that sit at the edge of voice networks to control and secure those connections.
3) UC performance monitoring
This is where “the call is bad” becomes something measurable. Monitoring tools focus on media quality, trunk health, and route behavior, then help teams pinpoint where issues originate.
4) IT service management workflows
This is where signals turn into action: incident routing, escalation, change control, self-service, and automation so the right people fix the right issue quickly.
If you want to go deeper into key building blocks and desired outcomes, this UC Today explainer can help:
What tools and best practices do IT teams use to manage unified communications performance and avoid outages?
The best teams connect visibility to action.
They do not just monitor and hope. They build a loop: detect, diagnose, route, resolve, learn.
A mature approach typically includes:
- UC performance monitoring that can pinpoint where quality issues originate
- ITSM workflows that route incidents fast and reduce repeat failures
- change management that prevents “we updated something and broke calling” moments
- migration planning so the move from legacy to cloud does not create long-running disruption
Where can I learn more about workplace connectivity?
For UC buyers, workplace connectivity usually means the calling and meeting paths that connect your organization to the outside world. Start with the UC Today hub: Service Management & Connectivity.
How UC Outages and Poor Call Quality Affect the Bottom Line
UC reliability is not a “nice-to-have” because it sits inside the daily rhythm of work. When it fails, the cost is not just the minutes the service is down. It is the work that stalls around it.
Here are three ways the impact shows up in business terms:
- Downtime cost and operational disruption
Even a single hour of downtime can carry a six-figure price tag for many enterprises, once you factor in lost productivity, delayed decisions, and reactive recovery work.
- Employee experience damage
In one survey of IT teams, 87% said strong digital experience improves productivity, 85% said it improves satisfaction, and 77% said it supports retention. If UC issues become a daily frustration, they become an employee experience problem, not just a technical one.
- Customer relationship impact
If communication networks between employees and customers degrade, it creates knock-on effects for brand and revenue. Customers experience the outcome, not the root cause.
This is why digital workplace connectivity matters. In most organizations, UC is now the operational glue. And if the glue fails, everything feels slower.
How Service Management & Connectivity Solves UC Outages and Poor Call Quality
There is no single magic switch that makes UC reliable. Reliability comes from joining together the pieces that reduce uncertainty.
Service management improves reliability by making response predictable. Connectivity improves reliability by making the outside-world connection visible and resilient. When you combine the two, you stop relying on guesswork.
Here is what that looks like in real buyer terms:
Service management helps you run UC like a managed service
It brings workflows, automation, and accountability. Instead of every incident becoming a bespoke investigation, teams build repeatable playbooks, faster escalation, and self-service for the everyday stuff. It also supports the migration journey many enterprises are still on: legacy on-prem systems to cloud, then AI enablement on top.
Connectivity tools keep external calling dependable
Internal collaboration is only one part of UC. External calls, contact center interactions, and partner communication rely on routes and services outside your walls. Connectivity-focused tooling helps you monitor those paths, see where degradation is coming from, and protect quality with better diagnostics and failover behavior.
Observability is the glue
Large enterprises often set up real-time monitoring environments, sometimes with dedicated operations centers, because they need a constant view of what is happening. Increasingly, that view also needs to include the behavior of automated systems and AI agents, because you cannot “tap an AI agent on the shoulder” the way you can with a human.
Want to see these tools in action? Dive into our report on successful use cases across 5 industries and discover the impact of effective service management & connectivity.
Trends Reshaping UC Service Management & Connectivity in 2026
A few years ago, this topic was mostly about keeping the lights on. In 2026, it is also about keeping up with a changing operating model.
Predictive diagnostics and earlier intervention
The ambition is shifting from “fix it fast” to “fix it before users notice.” Predictive diagnostics and early warning signals help teams address issues with minimal impact.
Workflow optimization becomes strategic
Service management is moving beyond ticket handling into workflow optimization. Enterprises want fewer manual steps and better self-help so people feel empowered rather than stuck waiting.
Observability expands beyond humans
As more automation and AI enters IT operations, teams need tools that observe what automated systems are doing. If an AI-driven workflow fails silently, the cost can be higher than a human mistake because it can scale fast.
The edge keeps expanding
Remote work, meeting rooms, and collaboration devices keep growing the surface area that affects UC quality. Networks need to be strong and flexible, but also observable, so issues can be diagnosed quickly.
Advanced WiFi upgrades are on the horizon
WiFi 6E and WiFi 7 are entering the conversation as part of enterprise upgrade cycles. For UC buyers, it matters mainly when it impacts real-time performance and meeting room reliability, rather than as a general networking refresh.
Interested in diving deeper into the trends reshaping this category? Check out our in-depth explainer here:
And if you’d prefer to absorb these insights in-person, here are the top events you should be attending:
Choosing the Right Vendor Solution
This is where buyers often get stuck. They know reliability is the goal, but not whether to prioritize monitoring, workflows, migration tooling, or all of the above.
A practical way to evaluate options is to start with objectives, then map tools to outcomes.
Here are common objectives and what typically fits:
- If your main problem is poor visibility, prioritize UC performance monitoring and diagnostics first. You need to know where the problem lives before you can fix it consistently.
- If your main problem is slow resolution, prioritize IT service management workflows, routing, automation, and self-service.
- If your main problem is migration risk, look for best IT migration tools and service management support that can handle phased moves from legacy to cloud.
- If your main problem is tool sprawl, prioritize platforms that integrate cleanly and reduce the number of places people have to look.
Here is a simple way to pressure-test a vendor shortlist:
- Can the vendor show how their tool improves UC reliability for both internal and external communications?
- Can they demonstrate how monitoring connects to workflows, not just dashboards?
- Can they explain, in plain English, what it takes to implement and adopt the product in 90 days?
- Can they help you translate the technical improvements into business value for the wider buying committee?
If you want to see how these platforms show up in real deployments, check out these real product reviews:
Can you walk me through a step-by-step buying guide for improving UC reliability with better service management and connectivity?
Think of the buying journey in five stages:
1) Discovery
Define the reliability problem clearly. “UC is unreliable” is not a requirement. “External calls fail in region X twice a week” is.
2) Consideration
Decide whether your biggest gap is visibility, workflows, migration support, or all three.
3) Evaluation
Test real scenarios. Ask vendors to demonstrate how they diagnose call quality issues, external calling failures, and the impact of changes.
4) Decision
Plan implementation before you sign. If you cannot describe the first 90 days, you are buying blind.
5) Post-purchase
Prove one outcome, then scale. Do not try to boil the ocean.
Choosing the Best Service Management & Connectivity Vendors
The vendor landscape splits into a few key categories, based on your needs and priority areas. Here are six areas within Service Management & Connectivity, and the relevant market-leading vendors.
Network & Connectivity Services
This includes the SD-WAN and cloud networking that underpin reliable UC performance.
- BT
- AT&T
- Verizon
UC Performance Monitoring & Quality of Experience
Monitoring tools measure call quality and user experience to proactively resolve issues.
- Microsoft
- Cisco
- IBM
IT Service Management (ITSM)
These platforms support IT incidents, changes, service requests, and ensure stable UC operations.
- ServiceNow
- BMC
- Microsoft
Unified Service Management (IT + UC)
Platforms that provide a single view of IT and UC services, improving operational efficiency and service reliability.
- HPE
- SAP
- Broadcom
API, Integration & Middleware Platforms
Integration tools that connect UC platforms with business systems, enabling automation and data flow across the enterprise.
- Broadcom
- Workday
- VMware
Cloud Infrastructure for UC
Infrastructure services optimized to host and scale UC workloads while meeting performance and resilience requirements.
- Amazon Web Services
- Oracle
Each vendor has its own angle. Some focus on perfecting workflows and ITSM automation. Others focus on deep integration into major UC ecosystems and observability. Specialists may focus on connecting multiple UC environments from a single operational view.
Most enterprise buying committees also include three recurring personas, each with a different “make or break” concern:
- CIO or IT leader: will it simplify and reduce outage risk, or overcomplicate the stack?
- Infrastructure or network lead: will it improve call and meeting quality and observability?
- UC or collaboration lead: will it help run UC like a managed service with fewer tickets, faster fixes, and better visibility?
To see a full market map of ITSM & Connectivity spheres, look no further:
And if you’d prefer a direct comparison of industry juggernauts, ServiceNow vs Atlassian (ITSM) and Cisco vs Juniper (Connectivity) take a look at our Tier-1 vendor comparison:
How to Implement Service Management & Connectivity
Implementation is where good tools either become a competitive advantage or become shelfware.
Before you sign a deal, do the boring work. It is the boring work that makes UC reliable later.
Here is a readiness checklist that keeps buyers out of the usual potholes:
- Baseline what is happening today
Know your top recurring UC issues, where they occur, and how long they take to resolve.
- Map ownership across teams
Clarify who owns UC, who owns the outside-world calling layer, and who owns service workflows.
- Confirm what data and signals you can access
A monitoring strategy is only as good as the visibility you can actually capture.
- Decide your first win
Pick one use case you can improve quickly, then expand.
- Plan the migration journey
If you are still moving from legacy to cloud, build migration support into your plan. Best IT migration tools matter most when you are migrating at scale, not when you are moving a small pilot.
If you are building an RFP, start with the buyer concerns above and explore how to turn those into measurable requirements:
Post-Deployment of Service Management & Connectivity
Once the tools are live, the goal is to avoid a very common trap: teams measure success by “it’s implemented,” not by “it improved something.”
A practical approach is to treat deployment like a product launch.
In the first month, focus on visibility and workflow. Make one problem easier to diagnose and faster to resolve. In month two, reduce repeat work through automation and self-service. In month three, show results to the wider committee using business language.
This is also the stage where you should build a feedback loop with vendors. If a tool is not surfacing the right diagnostics or it is creating noise, fix that early. It is far easier to adjust in month one than in month twelve.
How do I make sure my company’s IT is being updated regularly?
Updates are a reliability discipline, not a calendar event.
For UC environments, the safest pattern is to tie changes to a clear workflow: plan, stage, test impact on calling and meetings, then roll out with monitoring in place. When something changes and quality shifts, you want to be able to connect cause and effect quickly. That is one of the most practical reasons to integrate IT service management with UC performance monitoring.
What will the first 90 days of adoption look like? We cover the do’s and don’ts in our playbook for successful ITSM & connectivity adoption:
Tracking and Proving the ROI of Service Management & Connectivity Tools
ROI is where IT leaders often struggle, not because the value is not real, but because it is not always measured.
Start by deciding what “better” looks like for your organization. Then track the indicators that map to that goal. For most buyers, ROI shows up in a few places:
- fewer incidents and fewer repeat incidents
- faster time to diagnose and time to resolve
- improved call and meeting quality outcomes
- fewer escalations to senior teams
- smoother migrations with fewer user-impacting disruptions
If you need a simple story for the wider buying committee, anchor on outcomes they care about: less disruption, less lost time, better employee experience, and fewer customer-facing communication failures.
The Future of Service Management & Connectivity
The next phase of this market is not just “more tools.” It is a shift in how IT teams operate.
The future looks like more proactive operations, more automation, and more demand for evidence. Enterprises will expect systems that help them predict issues, not just react to them. They will also expect systems that can observe automated agents and workflows, because automation without observability is just risk at scale.
There is also a clear evolution in how people will interact with these platforms. Natural language operations is becoming a real ambition in the market. The idea is simple: describe a goal in plain English, and let the platform handle the technical steps. That is an innovation story many buyers will pay attention to, especially as they face skills shortages and rising complexity.
Executive Summary
If you remember one thing, make it this: UC reliability is not only a platform decision. It is an operating model decision.
Service management gives you the workflows and automation to run UC like a managed service. Connectivity gives you the visibility and control to keep external calling and real-time communications dependable. UC performance monitoring helps you separate symptoms from root causes. And digital workplace connectivity is the wider reality that modern work happens everywhere, so reliability must travel with it.
Buy the platform. But also buy the ability to run it.
FAQs
What tools and best practices do IT teams use to manage unified communications performance and avoid outages?
Most mature teams combine UC performance monitoring with IT service management workflows so issues can be diagnosed quickly and resolved consistently.
Where can I learn more about workplace connectivity?
Start with UC Today’s Service Management & Connectivity coverage, then explore our comprehensive guides to vendor selection, RFPs, and successful adoption linked above.
Can you walk me through a step-by-step buying guide for improving UC reliability with better service management and connectivity?
Yes. Define the problem, choose visibility versus workflow priorities, test real scenarios, plan a 90day rollout, then prove one outcome before scaling.
How do I make sure my company’s IT is being updated regularly?
Treat updates as part of the service. Stage changes, monitor impact, and connect changes to incidents so quality shifts can be traced quickly.
Is there a buyer’s guide that compares service management and connectivity solutions for unified communications?
Yes. This guide is designed to help you compare what you need across both layers, then build a shortlist and rollout plan.
