This year, Metrigy interviewed 935 participants from enterprises across 11 countries, gathering data on deploying and managing cloud phone systems, meeting apps, team collaboration, video room systems, headsets, virtual whiteboards, and always most interesting for VOSS, the UC administration management and UC performance management needs during transitions and daily operations.

It’s quite a read! Here are some highlights.

Slower Growth

Metrigy explains that after the rapid investment that took place across 2020 and 2021 – where organizations were tasked with making hybrid working a reality by quickly deploying whatever combination of UC technology that could solve the problem – the adoption curve of new UC technology accelerated and eye popping 7 years from prior projections!  And while the growth trajectory has slowed, the main challenge remains: How do companies best operationalize their new UC deployments? 

Vendor Churn

Metrigy also uncovered that “significant percentages of companies are changing or evaluating vendors” – typically more than 30% for each technology area in the study. This correlates with VOSS’ market experience, where our customers are both moving to newer cloud centric solutions and due to the economic environment, they are now being held to account to fully to make sure that their UC technology investments deliver an ROI by ensuring migrations to new environments get done quicker, that the increasingly disparate components from multiple vendors all effectively interoperate, that the platforms are more cost effective to run, more efficient and easier to manage.

As organizations come to realize that some areas of their UC estate are performing less well than others, there is a compelling case to look for a more suitable solution and switch out one vendor for another.

What is behind this vendor churn? According to Metrigy, the top three reasons for an organization to switch UC vendor, are:

• Cost is too high
• Integrating into other technologies is too difficult
• Product / service is unreliable

However, vendor change is hard, time consuming, and disruptive. VOSS solves all of these problems. We make the change easier to operationalize by removing any manual effort, minimizing disruption, giving more freedom to new deployments, and ensuring the most business value is delivered.

UC Administration and UC Performance Management

Now is a good time to focus on two of Metrigy’s research areas: UC administration management, and UC performance management:

• UC administration management brings automation and solves all of the challenges listed above – making the UC platform more operational, better integrated, more cost effective, and easier to manage. UC automation provides zero-touch workflows that take away complexity, remove the risk of human error, and enable multi-vendor platforms to operate and be managed seamlessly.Organizations are increasingly aware that UC administration management tools make vendor churn easier to navigate, as they can transition from one technology to another, safe in the knowledge that it’s all being taken care of by the UC administration layer.

• Performance management brings business insight, context, actionable intelligence; furnishing the organization with the data needed to make decisions that improve collaboration, that positively impact productivity, and that help fuel growth.Don’t forget, it’s performance management tools that will highlight the need for vendor churn. But overall, if you can understand and measure license usage, monitor and proactively improve quality, then service levels will rise and experience will improve.

UC Management Growth

In my opinion, that’s why UC administration management and UC performance management are becoming one of the most important pieces of the UC estate.

Metrigy finds that an average of 58.1% organizations use UC management tools today, rising to 63.6% in North America.

The Numbers Do the Talking

Metrigy cites that UC administration management enables organizations to grow revenue (4.6%), reduce costs (4%), and shrink provisioning time (6.8 minutes). Here at VOSS, we recently received evidence from a global service provider customer that, after installing VOSS, the company experienced a huge reduction in tickets, and of the tickets they are still executing, it now takes 50% less time to resolve the issues.

New Technology Movement

In this chart we see that there is a lot of movement in cloud phone systems, with video room systems and meeting systems becoming more prone to churn. Vendor change across these areas of the UC estate require management – automation management to enable seamless vendor transition, and performance management to gain the actionable intelligence to know you are making the right decisions.

Traditionally, UC management has sat over the core of the UC estate. Now it must be an end-to-end experience – with management capabilities stretching across headsets, meeting rooms, third party tools and multi-vendor platforms. The complexity needs to be managed, and automation is the only way.

Conclusion

We really have only scratched the surface with this summary. There is a wealth of interesting data in Metrigy’s latest report. If you would like to discuss our findings in more detail, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.