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What are the biggest trends in UC service management?
Mike Frayne, CEO, VOSS Solutions: "The major trend for VOSS is hyper-automation. As global economies deteriorate, companies need to respond rapidly once again to external influences.
"A UC platform that is agile and resilient is essential to deal with changes - from supporting flexible working, adopting new technologies faster, and reducing costs in an environment of global economic uncertainty.
"During the pandemic, organisations adopted UC solutions without a structured deployment plan, resulting in overlapping and unintegrated solutions. Now needing to reduce costs, organisations are looking to digitisation and extending automation to rationalise their UC solutions.
"This will allow them to go beyond the basic onboarding/offboarding to zero-touch workflows and integration that absorb complexity, fuel productivity, improve employee experience, and save costs.
"UC Observability is another exciting development that we are supporting; the ability to proactively measure performance using telemetry, app metrics, logs, call metrics, flows, and synthetic testing, provides deep visibility into current and potential future trouble areas."
David Levy, Director of Marketing at Akkadian Labs: "As the number of unified communications products in use grows, provisioning and configuration workflows become more complicated and labour intensive to manage, causing IT administration difficulty for what are increasingly more diverse, multi-vendor, and hybrid cloud/on-prem environments.
"UC service management vendors are rolling out support for new platforms to address this change in the landscape.
"Interoperability of UC with other systems is critical as businesses do not want their UC platforms walled off from other software.
"UC solutions may need to get information from or provide data to other systems. Integrations with call monitoring, call analytics, E911, call recording, CRM, HRIS, IT service management (ITSM) and more are required to meet this challenge.
"UC service management solutions can be a hub that ties all of these disparate systems together and makes sure UC platforms do not exist in silos."
Dessi Schachne, Vice President, Marketing at Kurmi Software, Inc.: "Right now, the three biggest trends we see in UC are multi-vendor environments, moving UC systems to the cloud, and interoperability.
"In a post-pandemic world, there are very few large companies that rely on a single vendor or one collaboration platform to power hybrid work. Implementing multi-vendor, modular UC makes it easier to replace outdated elements, add best-of-breed features, and ensure business continuity.
"UC service management providers that have traditionally been associated with a particular vendor or technology are now having to expand capabilities and offer integrations across UC vendors and, increasingly, across IT systems such as HRIS and ITSM platforms.
"These two trends, together with the rise in UCaaS adoption—where almost every organisation is hosting at least part of their UC infrastructure in the cloud—are driving the need for interoperability and assistance with migrations.
"This is where UC service management tools come in. Companies that want their platforms connected and communicating with each other, or want to ease the burden of migrations, adopt tools like Kurmi Unified Provisioning."
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How is AI being used to enhance service management in UC?
Mike Frayne, CEO, VOSS Solutions: "It's got to be self-healing. The holy grail of managing a UC platform is being able to proactively detect issues and then have these issues resolved with as little human intervention as possible. Self-healing does just this.
"Combining monitoring solutions that provide actionable insights into the UC platform and provisioning solutions with AI and machine learning supports automated resolution.
"Problems are detected by the monitoring solution, AI and other rules-based logic; the issue is analysed to determine the optimal resolution, and then the provisioning engine implements the defined solution - and we have self-healing!
"Self-healing delivers improved user experiences and SLAs and reduces downtime and cost.
"VOSS' established monitoring and provisioning solutions are constantly being augmented to deliver automated self-healing workflows that require minimal-to-no human intervention."
David Levy, Director of Marketing at Akkadian: "AI for service management in UC is in the early stages of impacting commercially available products.
"AI and other automation approaches are clearly needed as components of UC service management technologies to align with the increasing size and complexity of the UC stack.
"Especially considering the competitive environment for hiring and retaining highly qualified UC engineers, the need for AI and automation to reduce manual workloads is impacting the future roadmaps of UC service management product development.
"AI's predictive capabilities will certainly be adopted in new and inventive ways to provide a streamlined operational system.
