Taming the Beast of Exponential Growth in Multi-Vendor UC Environments
October 5, 2020
Shaun Wormald, VP Asia Pac, VOSS Solutions
UC growth
Recent industry research shows that the global unified communication as a service (UCaaS) market was valued at USD 31.52 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.5% from 2020 to 2027.
This speed and scale of growth is unprecedented. Pre-COVID, there was a nascent acceptance that cloud-based models were having a favourable impact on the UC market, as more and more companies looked to cloud collaboration tools to solve a myriad of communications and digital transformation challenges across their business. Couple this with the recent COVID pandemic which has pushed the need to support remote workers and prevent any impact on employee productivity to the top of the agenda, and we see the perfect storm for UC market growth.
The rise of multi-vendor environments
In my experience, the communications industry cycles through two phases: For a period of time single vendor solutions will be in the ascendency and the industry will be happy to purchase these fully integrated and cohesive solutions, even if they lack some functionality and are somewhat “one size fits all”. Then, we evolve to the next phase which shows preference for a multi-vendor solution; sacrificing seamless integration for exciting new functionality and the value that best of breed technology brings.
In the UC space, we are most certainly in that multi-vendor phase right now and while some businesses are looking for the simplicity that a single vendor offers, they ideally need multiple vendors to maintain negotiating power and stay on top of best of breed capabilities. This has traditionally been an either / or situation. However, with multi-vendor orchestration and management tools this no longer has to be the case – one can have the benefits of best of breed multi-vendor and have the simplicity of a single vendor type solution. The meteoric rise of point solutions such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Teams and Zoom have forced organisations to adopt a multi-vendor strategy, whether they like it or not.
The COVID crisis has exacerbated this. The rule book went out of the window as organisations scrambled to roll out tools as quickly as possible and to enable employee productivity, without considering the impact on infrastructure, network resources, integrations or the need for centralized control, insights and assurance required to be successful. In more extreme cases, influenced by highly successful product lead sales strategies, employees have simply adopted tools in order to remain remote and productive. This latter case is placing corporate pressure to rapidly deploy tools to help them manage, integrate and measure the adoption and usage of collaboration tool proliferation.
Taking control
So, how do you get a handle on your multi-vendor UC platform to prevent costs from spiralling, to keep administration in check, and to ensure that customer and employee experience remains positive? And, how do you manage, monitor and control the impact of these disparate tools on your network?
We are in the grip of a global digital transformation and the rules are pretty fluid; agility is no longer a “nice to have” but critical. All companies are at various stages along their transformation journey, but the general requirements are the same:
- Overarching administration management platform for all UC tools from a single pane of glass, regardless of vendor technology
- Role-based access control for devolved administration and self-service
- Automation for zero-touch workflows, to carry out repeatable MACD tasks at speed to enable and digitise business processes
- Real-time UC monitoring and analytics
Hybrid solutions
In this exciting period of growth, we see hybrid and multi-cloud technologies dominating. Companies that are harnessing best of breed technologies – both on-premise, and in private and public clouds – and then managing this blend of technology effectively, will be the winners.
It’s clear that UC is fundamental to distributed teams, innovation, and to remote working that underpin business growth, and as such:
- It’s important to provide the right tools to employees that promote productivity, that ensure a great employee experience which in turn fuels your customer satisfaction and business growth. In the words of Richard Branson “If you look after your staff, they’ll look after your customers. It’s that simple.”
- Without the very best UC management technology helping realise your company vision and growth objective it just becomes that much harder and more costly both internally and in terms of customer experience.
VOSS is the leading UC management vendor offering a complete suite of multi-functional, multi-vendor UC management and UC assurance tools to deliver the business outcomes required. The majority of other UC management vendors are single dimension – they offer only assurance or only fulfillment, or are heavily weighted to specific vendors. Some vendors offer both assurance and fulfillment, but often only for a single vendor.
VOSS offers highly integrated UC fulfillment management, assurance, analytics and reporting, accounting and migration. Our solutions automate technologies from disparate UC vendors; all from a single, flexible, secure, web portal. VOSS offers multi-vendor depth and breadth in UC management and assurance tools that makes VOSS a global leader in this critical area.
Our tools are built on a dynamic, orchestration and business rules framework which enables rich feature support, and highly agile and adaptable means of delivering business operations.
We invite you to get in touch with us, to look at how we can help you take back control of your UC platform, and get a deeper insight into how your staff are using their collaboration tools.
