1. What kinds of challenges do businesses face in multi-vendor environments when it comes to managing MS Teams?
Ian McCarthy, Virsae Director UK & EMEA: “Here’s a real-world example of complexities in multi-vendor environments that are beyond the scope of Call Analytics and the Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) available in the Microsoft Teams admin center.
“A global carrier supports a large multi-national customer with the following architecture: Multiple Teams Tenants, Microsoft calling plans in the US; Operator Connect with a European Telco; and direct routing via the customer-owned SBC located in Thailand.
“The challenge: How could the global carrier capture service management info from all these gateways to deliver a coherent view of call quality and technical performance?
“Engineers require a single interface that captures every interaction, end-to-end, regardless of equipment or vendor.
“The interactions they manage are presented as a single visual rendering; engineers fully understand quality and technical performance and know where to look when things falter. The picture resolution also means lower-level support can troubleshoot at high levels driving a radical decrease in helpdesk escalation.”
Alan Shen, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Workplace Solutions, Unisys: “There are a few challenges businesses face in multi-vendor environments, especially as workers begin returning to the office.
“A lot of hardware used for most conference/meeting room systems is only aligned to work with one UC platform but not multiple.
“Adopting a multiplatform system, though, can be time-consuming for both admins and end-users, as employees will typically have a steeper learning curve and require more support to master the use of both platforms.
“If not implemented correctly, a multi-platform environment can be a barrier to communication and collaboration. For example, what if an organization's sales team uses Zoom, but the marketing team prefers Microsoft Teams?
“If a sales executive is trying to connect with someone in marketing, they may not receive a response on Zoom if the individual in marketing is not monitoring their Zoom notifications.
“In addition, each platform provides IT teams with different metrics and/or defines its metrics using unique parameters, making it difficult to accurately measure and improve the end-user experience (unless, of course, you're using a third-party monitoring tool).”
Tim Jalland, Solution Manager, VOSS Solutions: “By their nature, most UC deployments, including MS Teams, have a multi-vendor side to it, MS Teams just does not cover all the ground.
“What that means is that organizations are faced with a patchwork of portals, tools and command line scripts for the different aspects, heavy reliance on technical staff that often work in silos and disjoint, manual multi-step processes.
“The net is that UC delivery is slow, prone to errors, inefficient vs. being dynamic, flexible, efficient and devolved around the organization.
“UC performance suffers – there’s no end-to-end view – and tracking and resolving issues is super difficult.”
Vincent Le Thiec, Product Manager at Kurmi: “For years, Microsoft has provided new experiences in the UC sector.
“Continually upgrading and changing user experience is a good approach, but it means that the teams in charge of telephony services for large organizations face a time-consuming and expensive process when adapting their legacy telephony features to services now offered by MS Teams.
“To simply try and reproduce the existing legacy telephony services in the cloud would be determinantal to long-term user experiences and even if a business has already deployed Skype for Business.
“So, inevitably, managing Teams comes with uncertainties and unknowns, but if you’re looking to make a transition, there are still many gradual strategies that can work to ensure successful migration from each system.”
Anders Løkke, Senior Director of Strategic Alliances at Pexip: “The real question isn't really about managing Microsoft Teams. Teams is here to stay, and businesses embrace it to the fullest.
“But the fact is that businesses already also manage multiple other solutions for communications and collaboration, and therein lie numerous challenges.
“Managing multiple solutions and ensuring they work in parallel or together with Teams can be cumbersome, costly, and time-consuming.
“Many businesses have put in place comprehensive strategies for where they want to go with their communications and modern work platforms, and for many, consolidating solutions is critical.
“But organisations often also have very different solution requirements, taking into consideration privacy and security, GDPR and where data is stored, and who can access it.
“For that there may be a need for multiple solutions that can work alongside and adjacent to Teams.
2. What are the major considerations for a business looking at purchasing UC management tools?
Ian McCarthy, Virsae Director UK & EMEA: “Let’s start with the numbers: Industry analyst Metrigy discovered that more than 50% of organisations believe that it’s vital to centrally manage audio, video, and network performance for Work From Home (WFH) employees.
“According to Gartner, 74% of enterprises expect the shift to remote working to be permanent, reaching 600m by 2024.
“UC performance variability is not usually the fault of UC platforms themselves. The trouble is that WFH networks and consumer-grade ISP aren’t always up to the standard required to deliver enterprise communications and the quality of customer experience expected.
“When you consider the wide and varied architecture on offer from the UC vendors, the various Session Border Controllers (SBC) that may be in the mix, along with end-user WFH networks and environments, you need an end-to-end solution to capture deeper insights, with contextual details, to accurately address Teams quality problems, wherever they exist.”
Alan Shen, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Workplace Solutions, Unisys: “While there are both advantages and disadvantages of moving towards a single vendor solution, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
“In a single-platform environment, employees don’t have to worry about navigating several different user interfaces and features in order to communicate and collaborate.
“End-users' hardware setups often are optimized for one platform or another. When a user is switching between multiple different platforms for meetings, the time needed to reconfigure the setup for different platforms can impact the employee's productivity. A single platform environment prevents this issue.
“Without being able to directly compare UC performance and end-user experience using the native admin consoles, it is near impossible for IT administration to understand if the multiplatform environment is effective. Moving to a single platform resolves this discrepancy.
“As vendors evolve their feature sets, maintaining interoperability across multiple vendors can be challenging. A solution that integrates two vendors may work today, but that interoperability may not work in the next version.
“Sticking with a single vendor increases the likelihood that today’s investments will continue to be relevant in subsequent versions. Cost is typically more optimized in a single vendor solution.
“Each UC platform has its own strengths, so a multi-platform environment means that your organization has access to "best-of-breed” capabilities. Moving to one platform will require making some tradeoffs, since no single vendor is the best at everything.
“The use of specific platforms for targeted groups or specific work functions can support a better employee experience. For example, many end-users (especially Gen Z) are used to navigating multiple apps or platforms and have built community and made connections on their platform of choice.
“Taking away that choice in favor of a single-platform environment may impact employee satisfaction and efficiency if the migration project does not include a strategic approach to organizational change management.
“Today’s UCC solutions are designed to engage users outside of an enterprise’s direct payroll. If an enterprise collaborates with a wide range of customers and partners, selecting a single vendor may create adoption friction if external users are working in a different platform.”
Tim Jalland, Solution Manager, VOSS Solutions: “UC and MS Teams are the fabric of how an organization communicates and works together – that means a comprehensive control panel to operate the service, our top four considerations are intuitive workflows and automation, insights, business process integrations, and migration tools.
“Intuitive workflows and automation - so that regular day-to-day changes can be administered from the service desk without the need or involvement of highly skilled technical staff
“Insight with flexible dashboards, analytics and reporting to guarantee user experience and the underlying quality and performance of the service, end-to-end.
“Integration with business processes, such as user onboarding through ServiceNow, to support zero-touch provisioning across the various multi-vendor components that make up the service.
“Tools for migration – discovery and consolidation of existing systems, saving support and licensing costs, as organizations move from older UC and telephony platforms and to the cloud and MS Teams.”
Vincent Le Thiec, Product Manager at Kurmi: “Increasingly UC services are available in the Cloud and vendors are constantly launching new UC services into the cloud market.
“The result? An incredibly fast-moving space, where IT teams need to stay on top of new features and upcoming updates. These are rolled out more and more frequently and don’t just include addons, but also new features that may potentially break the backward compatibility.
“This is leading to more businesses investing in UC management tools to delegate repetitive and time-consuming work.
“Businesses should then consider which UC management tool to purchase. They should ask: Is it cloud orientated? Does the tool answer the problems I am facing? Is the tool customizable? Will the tool work for all situations I want to use it in?
“It is also worth getting to know the company behind the tool, who should be committed, listen to customer requirements, offer good customer support, and provide a clear roadmap.”
Anders Løkke, Senior Director of Strategic Alliances at Pexip: “As with the challenges, it is vital to fully understand the requirements the business has.
“Today, even with some of the most popular meeting platforms and solutions, things aren't straightforward.
“There may be one system and dashboard for managing, monitoring, and analyzing meetings and calls, but a plethora of solutions for managing the devices and systems used to place these calls and join these meetings.
