Remember maps?
Opened wide on the passenger seat of the car, they seemed to somehow fight back as you struggled to plot a route to that place you’d never been before.
Trouble was, you first needed to identify your starting point before you could even think about your destination.
Today? GPS, of course.
It knows where you are so it can work out where you need to go.
Just type in your destination and you’re en route in moments.
For enterprise organisations searching for a better way of working, that same kind of technological innovation can be key as they navigate to the cloud.
After all – just as with maps – they can only identify the best direction to take by knowing where to begin.
“Most organisations appreciate the benefits of moving to the cloud but first they must fully understand the position from which they are starting that journey,” says Tim Jalland, Solution Manager at global digital workplace management software provider VOSS, whose smart new tool, VOSS Discover, provides all the answers.
“It’s a challenge for many organisations because their hard-to-access legacy infrastructures contain the information they need. Traditional telephony systems (PBXs), coming to the end of their lifecycle and prime to move to the cloud and Microsoft Teams, are a great example of this.
“They need to look inside their existing PBX systems for the critical data needed to support the redesign of their enterprise-specific cloud-based workflows, processes and functionality requirements.
“Until now, that has normally meant they have had to access and interrogate command lines, codes and computerised scripts. Generally, they have a lot of people in their organisation using many services with multiple user parameters generating very large amounts of configuration data.
“Those organisations need a highly-skilled PBX engineer with a lot of time to extract all of that data.
“That’s a big enough challenge on its own but it is made much bigger if the organisation needs to simultaneously run a live business-as-usual service.
“We’re talking about risking contact centre functionality and all of the organisation’s executive phone lines, not to mention everyone else’s wider user experience. It’s like surgery: you’re inside the patient so you can’t pull the wrong wire or do the wrong thing”
VOSS Discover – sold both directly and as a wholesale offering to Managed Service Provider partners – cleverly and intuitively automates the extraction of key data from existing ‘live’ PBX systems and pulls it into an internal database.
It then produces a highly-visual and easy-to-understand dashboard comprising information such as connectivity scale and capability, number of endpoints, volume of call traffic, peak usage times, licensing conditions and costs, users preferences and behaviours, outage data and support costs.
Additionally, it identifies and removes outdated and superfluous data; cleaning and rationalising old systems by up to 40 per cent and resulting in increased capacity and enhanced performance.
“The organisation gets a snapshot of not only what is on the existing PBX system but also the likely problem areas that may need particular attention as part of any cloud migration,” says Jalland.
“An IT lead is able to take it into a senior leadership team meeting and share its contents in a way non-technical colleagues will understand. It provides an immediate sense of the likely complexity and cost of any migration so that budgets and resourcing can be planned.”
Alternatively, VOSS is happy to deploy its Discovery tool in a more consultative role if preferred.
“We can work closely with customers and partners if required,” says Jalland.
“We can essentially perform a brain dump out of their existing PBX system by pulling it through VOSS Discover.
“We’ll produce a report and do a briefing call so they can then take it away and use it internally.
“Our partners are able to offer it to their enterprise customers as a value add and, because they are by then engaged in the discovery process, they are very well-placed to play an integral role in those customers’ subsequent migration”
For those MSPs and VARs, the upsell opportunities are obvious.
For end user enterprises eyeing a future in the cloud, especially those who are looking to move to Microsoft Teams voice, their first steps can be confident and assured.
It seems all that’s needed is a good sense of direction…
To learn more about how VOSS can help your business digitize and thrive, click here.
