Keeping unified communications and collaboration simple is central to the continued adoption of the technologies by users and to enterprises’ efforts to maximise their benefits and future-proof their investment. A logical step therefore appears to be selection of a single UC platform for use across the entire business. However, for many businesses this approach impedes flexibility, fails to meet the needs of all users and doesn’t take account of customer requirements to use other systems.
New Era Technology has recognised customers’ needs by partnering with both Cisco and Microsoft to ensure both provider’s capabilities are available to users. Offering the ability to embed Webex Call Center right into a Dynamics CRM desktop, for example, is a compelling proposition for many users. This enables wider choice and the ability to select the most appropriate and familiar technology for specific tasks and groups of users.
While the apparent benefits of single sourcing might be diluted, this is offset by greater flexibility to choose the most suitable blend of UC and collaboration tools for each business. Single sourcing isn’t always the best approach, confirms Chris Scimone, a Collaboration Architect at New Era Technology.
“Adopting a single suite is definitely popular where it fits and where it makes sense but there is growing interest in adopting more than one collaboration suite,” he says. “We’re seeing this happen for organisations that want to future-proof their operations, ensure resilience and support their hybrid workforces.”
Future-proof your Business with Multiple Suites
When it comes to future-proofing, Scimone says that adopting two suites means that a group of users that finds a particular feature of one platform appealing can be catered for while users from another group might prefer the call centre capabilities of an alternate suite, for example. “By perhaps letting part of your organisation select a tool that’s a better fit for them, even if the division is 90:10 in terms of usage across the organisation, you’re still enabling them to work in an optimal way,” he adds.
By partnering with both Cisco and Microsoft, New Era is delivering added value to its customers. “Both partners have leaned-in to their strengths,” Scimone explains.
“Cisco is from the voice and video world and call centre continues to be a strong capability while Microsoft with its Office suite, Teams and Dynamics CRM is highly familiar to users and provides great experiences. Cisco offers a fantastic experience for people who are physically in the room while Microsoft is very strong in office-style collaboration. Not everyone is going to do hybrid working the same way, so having multiple suites can offer the best of both worlds.”
Ensure Diversity
The benefits are not only centred on productivity. Resilience and disaster recovery can also be enhanced by deploying two suites. “Having two suites gives you flexibility and the ability to pivot if the situation changes,” he explains. “In addition, having diversity increases resilience. In private banking for example, having multiple suites available can help drive disaster recovery. In the event of an issue, it’s much easier to move over to a solution that is already in play than to move to a greenfield suite.”
Sweat the Legacy Assets
There are also additional benefits to unlock for organisations that have substantial legacy investments that they need to maximise value from. There may be equipment from specific vendors that needs to continue to be used to ensure the return on investment can be achieved fully and supporting multiple suites helps to ensure organisations can optimise utilisation of their legacy estate.
Scimone points out that New Era Technology’s job is to integrate and support multiple suites for the customer, supporting all vendors under a single service level agreement (SLA). “Call centres are moving into the cloud today and there’s a lot of data to manage,” he says.
“We help to ensure that the journey is at the customer’s pace and meets their requirements. The goal is to really enable customers to take advantage of new features and we have adoption services that help customers make use of cloud and hybrid environments. We don’t focus only on the implementation, we also focus on the whole lifecycle to ensure customers get the most out of their solutions.”
