When voice/telephony/collaboration managers or unified communications (UC) engineers are building their business case to justify the ROI of adopting a solution to automate UC administration they often focus on the benefits to their specific job functions, i.e. streamlining repetitive UC tasks (such as moves, adds, changes and deletes).
It is also useful to keep in mind how a UC automation solution is a cost-effective solution that supports more wide-ranging IT projects.
Senior level IT leaders (such as CIOs, Directors of IT, etc.) will appreciate how the turnkey features of most provisioning automation solutions align with broader IT initiatives, such as:
Digital Transformation and Automation
Manual provisioning across multiple UC applications and clusters is time-consuming and subject to errors. UC provisioning automation eliminates repetitive tasks, such as MACDs, and streamlines administration with job templates that provide a single pane of glass which can transform a 30-minute task into a 30 second task.
Security and Risk Management
Restricting access to your native UC applications with provisioning automation software helps minimise the possibility of service disruptions and outages. A role-based access feature enhances security by controlling who can run which jobs for which locations. This limits potential damage to your production systems.
End-User Empowerment
An out-of-the-box self-service portal for employees allows the end user to take care of administrative tasks (such as PIN resets and speed dials) on their own. This alleviates the ServiceDesk workload and allows UC engineers to focus on higher priority projects. It also enables limited IT resources to scale to serve a large organisation.
Improved SLAs
A native integration with Active Directory enables end-to-end zero touch on-boarding and off-boarding. Integration with ITSM (ServiceNow, BMC Remedy, Salesforce), HR (PeopleSoft, Workday) and identity management software (SailPoint, OneLogin) will also increase productivity. These features allow you to commit to increased service level agreements through efficient use of IT resources.
Compliance
Regardless of which regulatory environment is relevant to your business (HIPPA, PCI, NIST, etc.) you need to follow guidelines to make sure your data is safe. You should be able to easily run highly granular reports on configuration changes across multiple clusters. This level of enhanced visibility allows auditors to see who did what and when.
As you can see, UC provisioning automation streamlines the operational challenges from overwhelming workloads, while at the same time supporting a diverse set of broader IT initiatives.
Guest Blog by Tom Bamert, CTO, Akkadian Labs
Tom is CTO at Akkadian Labs and has 15 years of Cisco networking experience, seven of which include Cisco IP communication. In that time, he has deployed over 20,000 ports of network connectivity.
Simple. Seamless. Unified. Headquartered in New York City, Akkadian Labs exists to create innovative, forward-thinking software that simplifies UC administration. Akkadian is an experienced software firm with fully-packaged solutions, trusted by some of the world’s most successful companies. Since 2013, hundreds of companies have looked to Akkadian Unified Communications Solutions to streamline UC administration and management. For example, Akkadian Provisioning Manager alone manages 3 million licenses and it’s the go-to solution for the world’s leading Cisco Collaboration technology partners. Companies of all sizes and in all industries rely on Akkadian software because it’s built to be flexible; clients can customise Akkadian software to their UC environments, without costly professional services or consultation. Akkadian believes simple, seamless, and unified should be true of all deployments.
Find out more about Akkadian Provision Manager and schedule a demo.
