VOSS Integration – Enabling Business Process Automation
May 10, 2019
Bill Dellara, VP Product, VOSS Solutions
With the proliferation of UC services and applications in today’s business landscape, integration is more important than ever in enabling these to be centrally coordinated and in order to automate your business processes.
There is a lot of talk about integration between UC systems generally; with organizations considering open architectures, APIs, and middleware to achieve better business outcomes. In this blog we’ll take a look at how those concepts are implemented in VOSS-4-UC, and how they can be leveraged to manage your UC environment and to incorporate UC into your wider business processes.
In VOSS-4-UC, integration is a central part of the product’s architecture. Let’s explore what those capabilities are and how they help drive UC automation.
Southbound interfaces
VOSS-4-UC includes an extensive and ever growing suite of integrations that come out of the box, along with corresponding features that automate UC management tasks. Some recent additions include integrations to Broadworks, Cisco UCCX and UCCE, Expressway, Cisco IOS XE, Imagicle, and Microsoft Teams.
In addition, VOSS-4-UC includes a generic driver capability that can define an integration to virtually any application. This can be via an API for applications that provide one, however we still encounter a lot of applications that don’t provide an API or provide partial coverage in their APIs. So for these scenarios we have a GUI orchestration capability so that steps via the application’s portal can still be automated.
Once an integration to an application has been configured, organizations can use this to automate tasks in the VOSS-4-UC portal, in the bulk loader, and of course in our own API. This is one of the key enablers in VOSS-4-UC’s ability to drive automation extension by easily and rapidly expanding the applications and devices that can be incorporated into workflow automation.
Northbound interfaces
VOSS-4-UC provides extensive capabilities to interact with upstream systems, including a comprehensive and secure REST API interface that provides a single point of integration for external applications to interface between VOSS-4-UC and the UC solution.
The northbound notification interface provides the ability to push data to upstream systems based on activities in VOSS-4-UC. This ensures those upstream systems are kept up to date with information needed in near-real time when that data changes in VOSS-4-UC.
The flexibility in VOSS-4-UC means that interfaces can be simple and tailored to the needs of the integration, which significantly increases the ease and speed with which the integration can be achieved. This also keeps the detailed UC logic and business rules outside of the integration which means the API interface doesn’t need to be impacted when the logic changes to meet evolving business needs. The fact that the integration interface isn’t impacted saves significant costs and time in implementing the changes.
What can these integration capabilities do for you?
With the extensive northbound and southbound capabilities, VOSS-4-UC can act as the perfect UC middleware layer that bridges your upstream business applications with the UC applications that deliver the collaboration needs for your users.
Let’s take a look at a few examples of how these integration capabilities are being used by our customers today, and the benefits they are realizing.
Flow-through Provisioning
Zero touch provisioning can tie UC fulfillment tasks in VOSS-4-UC to business activities in the external systems for automated fulfillment. Some examples include directory changes initiating onboarding/offboarding activities or helpdesk tickets initiating a range of MACDs. This automation drives large gains, not only in efficiency and resource utilization, but also in the accuracy and consistency of the results.
Billing/Expense Management
VOSS provides a range of solutions to help ensure the accurate and timely generation of billing invoices. This includes multiple options from providing data feeds, event-driven notifications, or fully integrated billing/invoicing solutions and all help partners drive increased revenue collection.
Portal/Application Integration
Customers are able to easily expand the capabilities of their external applications and portals to incorporate UC workflows with simple interfaces. Whether the application is built within various digital workflow frameworks or is a homegrown application, the VOSS-4-UC APIs provide the simplest and quickest path to enabling UC tasks in those workflows.
BOTs
The ability to tie VOSS-4-UC tasks into BOT frameworks enables a wide range of use cases such as ties into AI systems or user interaction via chat interfaces. Example integrations with both the Microsoft BOT and Cisco Webex Teams frameworks allows the initiation of VOSS-4-UC actions via natural language interactions, all without leaving their native chat client. This makes it far easier for users, and drives adoption as there isn’t another interface to use or learn for their workload.
VOSS will be exhibiting at UC EXPO, Wednesday 15 and Thursday 16 May 2019. To discuss your UC integration requirements and how VOSS-4-UC can help, please visit us at booth #C103 or email [email protected].
