Virsae, VOSS, Kurmi, Pexip and Unisys on Managing Teams in Multi-Vendor Environments

1. What kinds of challenges do businesses face in multi-vendor environments when it comes to managing MS Teams?

Tim Jalland, Solution Manager, VOSS Solutions: “By their nature, most UC deployments, including MS Teams, have a multi-vendor side to it, MS Teams just does not cover all the ground.

“What that means is that organizations are faced with a patchwork of portals, tools and command line scripts for the different aspects, heavy reliance on technical staff that often work in silos and disjoint, manual multi-step processes.

“The net is that UC delivery is slow, prone to errors, inefficient vs. being dynamic, flexible, efficient and devolved around the organization.

“UC performance suffers – there’s no end-to-end view – and tracking and resolving issues is super difficult.”

 2. What are the major considerations for a business looking at purchasing UC management tools?

Tim Jalland, Solution Manager, VOSS Solutions: “UC and MS Teams are the fabric of how an organization communicates and works together – that means a comprehensive control panel to operate the service, our top four considerations are intuitive workflows and automation, insights, business process integrations, and migration tools.

“Intuitive workflows and automation – so that regular day-to-day changes can be administered from the service desk without the need or involvement of highly skilled technical staff

“Insight with flexible dashboards, analytics and reporting to guarantee user experience and the underlying quality and performance of the service, end-to-end.

“Integration with business processes, such as user onboarding through ServiceNow, to support zero-touch provisioning across the various multi-vendor components that make up the service.

“Tools for migration – discovery and consolidation of existing systems, saving support and licensing costs, as organizations move from older UC and telephony platforms and to the cloud and MS Teams.”

3. Is security still a big issue when trying to manage with multiple solutions?

Tim Jalland, Solution Manager, VOSS Solutions: “That comes down to access, confidentiality and the integrity of the configuration and performance data across the solution – UC management systems must enforce this and offer role-based access, strong passwords or credentials, segregation of data (for example a hierarchy by department) and controls to ensure a full audit path of any changes made.”

4. What are the advantages and disadvantages of moving towards a single vendor solution when it comes to UC Management?

Tim Jalland, Solution Manager, VOSS Solutions: “Most UC components, including MS Teams, come with a level of management capability – it’s out of the box and included so that’s the advantage. But that’s also the disadvantage – it’s basic.

“Organizations have moved on from this, to invest in a single vendor management and control panel, to build, operate and run their multi-vendor UC solution.

“Ultimately that leads to a better user experience, increased productivity, lower running costs and the ability to scale and change to meet evolving business needs.”