As effective as unified communications systems are for improving staff productivity, cutting expenditure and meeting expectations for quality of experience, maintaining them from the backend isn’t always so easy.
In fact, we’d go as far as to say that keeping every channel running constantly without investing huge chunks of capital into hiring a team of highly trained technical specialists to watch over a network in continuous shifts around the clock is nigh on impossible – or at least it was.
With Virsae’s VSM (Virsae Service Management) however, businesses and service providers no longer have to worry about the what ifs or maybes and can rely on the highly intelligent VSM platform to sniff out threats and advise engineers on how to stop them from happening.
How, you ask? Well, in order to find out we decided to put the platform to the test to see how well it lives up to these claims.
Core design
Like any great product, VSM has been architected on a set of very sound design principles:
Cloud
VSM is a native cloud application. Delivered from Microsoft Azure, VSM is inherently resilient to technology failure and backed by a pool of cloud resources for unlimited global scale. Last month VSM analysed 257 million calls for voice quality and processed over 9 billion unique UC transactions. As a cloud app it also means VSM upgrades and new services happen in the background. Gone are the days of major release shipments every year, Virsae deploys new features every week allowing customers to exploit new functionality immediately.
ITIL
VSM aligns with the ITIL, the defacto standard for IT service management across the world. Doing so allows IT managers to integrate the management of UC networks in to their wider IT service management programmes.
Open standards
VSM’s developers have adopted an open standards approach allowing customers to easily integrate the platform with other software and services. As an example, Virsae has a ready integration with ServiceNow, allowing alarms, configuration and capacity data to raise incident tickets and feed in to IT configuration management databases.
White label
VSM is a white-label cloud service designed for service providers and resellers to underpin managed services for their own customers under their own brand.
What can it do?
Improve CX
Customer service is the key to success for any business and ensuring each caller is responded to as quickly as possible by guaranteeing lines remain open on a daily basis should be a top priority.
With VSM, engineers have round the clock visibility of every element of their UC platforms to keep them running flawlessly. Live dashboards, real time reports and vector diagrams flag potential problems and enable businesses and service providers to close the gaps before they disrupt customer service.
Protect UC Configuration Data
Though there are a few exceptions, most business’s IT backup plans do not include a regime for UC configuration data. When disaster strikes an engineers will typically have to spend many hours reconfiguring their UC platforms to the state they were in prior to an outage. .
VSM takes a daily snapshot of a business’s UC configuration data and stores it in the cloud. This lets engineers access the most up to date version and the business to continue where it was.
Simplified Configuration Management
UC systems are known for their complex structures, making it notoriously difficult to track the status of hardware and software assets. Manual audits are costly, time consuming and are of date before the ink has dried on the paper.
VSM takes care of the heavy lifting of tracking and modelling servers, gateways, handsets and software versions, together with settings and platform configuration. Every day prepare an updated configuration management database, showing the new status and location of UC assets.
A New Pair of Eyes
If you stare at something long enough you can’t see the wood from the trees – and this is undoubtedly the case when it comes to detecting errors and fixing bugs in a complicated unified communication system.
