Multi-Vendor Agile UC – It’s a Reality and it Fuels Customer Success
May 23, 2019
Darrel Bremer, Head of Customer Success, VOSS Solutions
At a time when there is a lot of uncertainty in the hosted UC space due to ongoing consolidation and regular changes in strategic direction from the major UC technology vendors, service providers and large enterprises are being forced to adapt their approach to vendor commitment and service offering development.
The last few years have seen Microsoft on a development journey from Lync to Skype for Business to MS Teams, as they search for the optimal solution that meets market demand. Cisco has also launched its share of collaboration tools, with Jabber, then Spark, and now Webex Teams. With a question mark over the strategic direction of Cisco HCS versus Broadsoft, not to mention failures such as Troppo, the messaging from vendors has been confusing at best, leaving service providers and large enterprises unclear as to what will be released next year, let alone in the next five.
The result is that service providers and large enterprises have to question their dependence on their preferred vendors to define their UC strategy and a shift in loyalty from one or two strategic vendors to a more ‘best of breed’ approach as they recognize that they are empowered to differentiate themselves by adopting technology that suits their needs or that meets the demands of their own customers.
From what we at VOSS see in the market today, service providers are looking at ways to abstract the business data layer, so that they can lay this data over any UC technology they feel fits their purpose. Service providers are even looking for the ability to exchange underlying UC technology ‘on the fly’, providing the ability to interchange from one technology to another, without the need to engage in complex cross platform migrations.
We are also seeing a growth in demand for mixed estates (mostly driven by cost), where service providers and large enterprises want to deploy mixed estate, to provide the option of low cost basic telephony as well as high end feature rich telephony as part of a consolidated UC solution.
VOSS-4-UC’s multi-vendor support capability is perfectly positioned to help our customers achieve exactly this; they can abstract the business data layer (including sites, users, devices, lines and features) from the UC technology layer, and mix or even exchange UC technology due to drivers such as business requirements, product differentiation, or even changes in strategic direction.
Dynamic orchestration of provisioning workflows allow our customers to seamlessly provision users across multiple UC platforms, allowing for a single view of a UC estate, irrespective of what the underlying UC technology could be. Examples of these types of deployment includes:
- Hybrid Cisco HCS / BroadSoft architectures
- Hybrid Cisco HCS / Webex Teams implementations
- Hybrid HCS / low cost calling implementations
- Hybrid MS Teams / Cisco HCS architectures
Rich API integration capabilities also allow for the added benefit of deploying zero-touch flow-through provisioning workflows, to on-board users and all their services via platforms such as ServiceNow, onto any integrated UC technology, with the click of a button.
In addition, the abstraction of business data and centrally captured provisioning data, all within a single provisioning platform, gives our customers the ability to perform deep analytics on provisioning trends and the usage of services, further streamlining their service offerings and operational processes.
If you are interested in finding out more about how to build an agile UC environment with VOSS-4-UC, please get in touch.
