UC Service Delivery and Management

The VOSS UC service delivery and management platform delivers an unprecedented capability to rapidly respond to change, with benefits including:

• Business-driven, rather than technology driven, communications management
• Rapid response to customer demands
• Automated service creation, delivery, customization and management
• Integration of communications with enterprise business processes
   

By way of example, a typical UC administration process that many companies are operating under today would follow a business process similar to that described below:

1. An IT administrator in a business location requires a change to their communications system (e.g. a new person has joined, or an existing phone needs replacing). The IT administrator will contact their central service desk (either an internally managed team or a 3rd party managed service provider) to log the request via phone, email, a web portal, or a ticket tracking system.

2. The central service desk receives the change requests. Prior to VOSS, the service desk agent would log the request into a ticketing system and a works order, which might consist of several independent tasks, would be created. This would automatically be passed to a central network operations center, or NOC.

3. The NOC has a team of certified engineers, who are the only people permitted to configure a change on the unified communications infrastructure. An engineer would be assigned the works order and they would directly access the native interfaces of each underlying system to perform the necessary configuration change. In most cases, a single works order will require the engineer to configure several systems to complete a single business process. For example, adding a user might require separate configuration steps for each of:

• The basic phone service would be configured on the IP-PBX
• The user may need to be added to various hunt groups or pick-up groups
• The voicemail service to be configured on the voicemail platform
• The user’s details would be created on the location’s auto attendant system
• The user’s details would be created on the location’s attendant console system
• The user’s details would be created extension mobility
• The user’s details would be created on the location’s audio conferencing system

And so on… and this is even before the range of unified communications services, such as unified messaging, instant messaging, presence, web conferencing, video conferencing and fixed-mobile convergence and so on are added to the platform.

4. Once the job had been completed, the ticket would be closed and the customer or user contacted to let them know that the change had been made.

It is not surprising that the above process can take up to five business days to complete. And even then, the chance of error is high, requiring yet another round of works orders to correct the mistake. That is why a simple business change can cost a company over $150.

Now let’s look at the process, but from the UC lifecycle management perspective:

1. The same IT administrator can log into a UC Management portal that allows him or her to see all of the Location’s users and telephony resources. Importantly, they cannot access any other data but their location and the portal can be customized to allow that administrator to perform many functions or only the most basic ones.

2. The IT administrator selects the business process that they require, such as add a user. The portal take the administrator through a simple process where phone types, service levels and numbers are offered and selected through drop-down menus. At the end of the process the IT administrator clicks on the “modify” button and that’s it.

The UC management platform automatically performs all the manual configuration tasks on all the various systems, replacing the service desk, the NOC and all the works orders.

The process is performed in real time, taking less than a minute.

The error rates are low and can be corrected by the IT administrator themselves anyway.

And the cost is only the time it would have taken the IT administrator to complete a change request … effectively zero dollars.

As the number of UC applications grows for complex, multi-faceted communications requirements, the benefits from a UC Manager of Managers system grows exponentially - one business portal automating many systems.