The easing of COVID-19 lockdown restrictions in many regions across the globe is seeing the opening up of businesses that have been closed or functioning via a significant number of employees working remotely are facing many issues surrounding their return to the office.
Alan Shen, Vice President of Consulting Services at Unify Square, a company whose software and services optimise and enhance the world’s largest collaboration and communication deployments, says many of these problems are related to the solutions they have been using at home.
“I’ve been working in the Unified Communications sector for 12 years and back then endpoints were static and consisted of fixed desk phones tethered to fixed lines which then extended to mobile comms in cars and hotel rooms which became a challenge for IT to manage – especially for executives on the end of a poor Wi-Fi connection.
In a way, lockdown has simplified comms, and delivered a sense of complacency. Today, the homeworker has basically reverted to that static scenario by using a single device connected to a home WiFi network. You could say that remote working has taken away all the variability IT had become familiar with.
But underneath that deskbound remote worker lies a sleeping bear that will most likely be awoken by their pent-up desire to reconnect with people back in the office. As offices open up a hybrid mode of working will become common; meetings will see a cluster of people in the office and another cluster still based at home.
Video meetings have taken off during the lockdown period and when it comes to its growth rate, video conference company Zoom has lived up to its name as use of the firm’s software jumped 30-fold in April. At its peak, the firm counted more than 300 million daily participants in virtual meetings.
This surge in video usage at home will bring expectation of using the application into the office and for IT this means that WAN and Internet bandwidth will need to be up to speed to ensure user quality expectations. If you combine this requirement with the fact that the easing of lockdown will see the return of mobile workers wanting to connect via video from an array of locations, then there’s likely to be some pain.
Do More with Less
Another return to work business scenario is likely to come in to play here; how are IT budgets standing up?
Most budgets are under pressure already but now IT are going to be asked to do more with less as the push for more applications to go to the cloud and additional Software as a Service (SaaS) licensing takes more funds away from the budget.
Enterprises need to be made aware of this and whilst some will already be aware of the problem others will not have undertaken a digital transformation yet.
Consider too the SaaS vendors providing these video solutions; it’s a highly competitive landscape where suppliers, in their headlong COVID-19 motivated rush to gain a meaningful customer base, deferred monetisation and secured their users at almost any cost.
At some point there will pressure on these suppliers to increase business from all of their customers who need to realise the implications of using something for free as it’s likely to be monetised through all the data being exchanged.”
So how can Unify Square help enterprises with these return to work scenarios?
According to Alan Shen, there are a number of ways.
“You have to recognise that today there are not reams and reams of people in IT available to drill down and analyse data; there’s time for data visualisation on screen but no time for the forensic analysis required to identify and potentially solve problems.
We are helping companies plan ahead because if enterprises wait for society to open up then it’s likely they will get hit with a lot of pain; we plan out meeting rooms and how to approach these UC scenarios. It’s like buying an umbrella when the sun is shining.
AI Steps Up
Here, the AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning) features in our PowerSuite enables organisations to side-step the visualisation and let the AI/ML carry out the drill down and analysis for them. If you think something odd is going on the Anomaly functionality will detect minor changes and variations from what is usually expected. There’s an analogy to be made here with COVID-19 in that early detection enables action to be taken before you even get close to a lockdown.
PowerSuite AI/ML transforms the troubleshooting experience with reporting on with reporting and analytics for Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack and Skype for Business along with Workplace from Facebook.
Troubleshooting is a lengthy and arduous process. Data analytics offer a glimmer of hope, but the volume and complexity of the data available pose challenges for smart management and control of these new platforms.
For example, in order to achieve full collaboration platforms ROI, you need to measure active versus planned usage and see how it is trending in your environment. PowerSuite’s Usage and Adoption compares usage between platforms and provides a unique and aggregated user experience visualisation. Importantly, user behaviour can be broken down by group, by custom tag, or even by individual. PowerSuite collects and analyses a wide variety of datapoints, from usage modalities to app store integrations to collaboration behaviour.
This means that IT can strategically use this data to correlate with overall platform rollout goals as well as service availability issues.
When it comes to trouble shooting, even the most well-managed collaboration and communications environments still have regular issues that challenge IT’s ability to efficiently prioritise their processes. PowerSuite’s Insights Center creates a centralised hub for IT to view a prioritised list of technical and system-related problems requiring attention, along with a clear way to track progress towards resolution.
PowerSuite uses machine learning, a continuously evolving set of rules, and proprietary technology algorithms to detect system anomalies for all platforms. Insights Center highlights the most critical issues in a ranked priority list and helps reduce TCO, letting IT choose when, how, and who will fix these key issues, based on time and resource demands.”
Alan Shen says there are many more features in PowerSuite to help organisations manage both these challenging return to work scenarios as they provide ongoing insight in to the effective use of today’s modern collaboration tools.
