Zoom is on the march – powering more and more conversations for large enterprises with multi-platform unified communication stacks.
Makes sense, of course. Whether in the office or working remotely, people want to interact in their preferred way and via their chosen channel. And, like its main competitors Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex, Zoom offers it all: voice calling and traditional business phone services, collaboration and meetings, persistent chat and marketing-leading video conferencing.
It’s super-simple for the end user, but what about at-scale security, provisioning and management? The Zoom native management portal provides some help, but it’s clunky and multi-phase. There are also the actual phone numbers to manage too – assigning, changing, and deleting where and when necessary. Many hands touch the data and there are too many manual steps for these tasks to be done on a regular basis.
For end user businesses and their IT Managed Service Providers, it pays to deploy software capable of centralizing, standardizing and streamlining all of the inter-dependent processes in ways which drive efficiencies and enhance user experience. It’s better still when that software is not tied to a single operator or technology provider in the domain but can be used to manage multiple vendors regardless of brand.
In fact, Zoom’s telephony and collaboration features are very often used in enterprises that also use telephony and collaboration by Microsoft and Cisco – making centralized management critical.
Picking the right vendor partner is therefore key.
“Zoom usage has grown fast among enterprise customers. Most large companies now have Zoom UC and Collaboration tools in use. The ability to automate license management, ensure secure changes and provision quickly and precisely can have a significantly positive impact on IT management costs,” says Micah Singer, CEO at leading global communications management software provider Kurmi.
Kurmi’s software has recently enhanced its multi-platform versatility by adding the capability to manage Zoom Phone users and to streamline creation of Zoom’s signature meeting rooms, Zoom Spaces.
Zoom Phone user provisioning is reduced from multiple steps and multiple screen views to just one. An IT Administrator can assign a calling licence and a phone number using Kurmi’s Dial Plan Management capabilities. Zoom Spaces – from creation and deletion, scheduling display all the way to managing digital signage – can all be configured en masse through the Kurmi platform.
“When a new person starts work at a big company – something that happens dozens of times every day on average at every big company – the employee is added to a common HR and/or IT directory. With the information entered in that common spot – often not even by someone in IT – our software can provision the rest of the UC and Collaboration setup in Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex and Zoom,” says Singer.
“Our middleware also sits nicely between many different directory tools – most notably EntraID and ITSM tools such as ServiceNow – that facilitate full automation of UC provisioning and management.”
According to research commissioned by Kurmi, 86% of large enterprises have two or more large UC vendors, and that figure is rising all the time. The same research reveals that 54% of those enterprises run Zoom alongside others.
“That is why Zoom is so important to a system that automates UC&C for large enterprises,” says Singer.
“They don’t have to go in and out of the native management portals of the different components of the collaboration stack. That is key because large enterprises have multiple vendors for a variety of reasons. They may operate in multiple countries where different vendors are dominant, they may have acquired businesses that are dependent on certain vendors, and they may be in the middle of a migration so it just makes economic sense.”
That kind of streamlined simplicity represents a significant win for all concerned.
- To learn more about how Kurmi can help your and your customers’ businesses leverage the benefits of automatically provisioning and managing Zoom at scale, visit the website.
