Increasingly, large enterprises are faced with the major challenge of how to create, deploy and manage next generation communication services, to support their business units’ growing demand for collaboration and mobility through UC.
Delivering new UC applications across large organizations brings different challenges to those faced by small and medium-sized businesses. Large enterprises typically have more distributed architectures with heterogeneous networks in place, and often a more complex, even multi-country, dial plan (the expected number and pattern of digits for a telephone number, which must comply with the networks to which they connect).
The challenges facing large enterprises IT&T departments include:
- Managing acquisitions, migrations and historically independent departmental integrations, onto a common, cost effective platform
- Enterprises often lack the quality and/or quantity of staff to support the growth of an advanced IP telecoms network
The addition of UC adds to the challenge:
- Large enterprises typically need to support a complex network architecture. A mixture of IP-PBX vendors, versions and models within each vendor, plus a legacy non-IP TDM architecture must be managed
- Complex UC applications have to be integrated into the enterprise network, and made network aware; it is not simply a case of adding an new application server
- The architecture needs to support multiple UC vendors, as no one vendor can provide best-in-class for all enterprise UC requirements
- Integrating UC and enterprise applications, to provide communications enablement within these applications, becomes an important driver for productivity gains