UC Today has hosted a roundtable discussion on Service Management, which was published on their website, here. Follows some extracts from the article:

It’s safe to say that the world of UC is becoming more complex.

You don’t just have phone calls to keep track of these days. Communication is happening on a much wider scale, covering everything from instant messaging to video.

A more complicated communication stack means that businesses can connect with their clients on more of the platforms they use. This often leads to better conversations, more meaningful buyer journeys, and bigger conversions. The only downside? There’s a lot more technology to keep track of.

Service management solutions in the UC landscape can help to reduce some of the stress that today’s businesses are under to keep their communication stack running smoothly. With a service management strategy, business leaders can provision new technology faster, track call quality, and prevent future issues.

We spoke to some of the market leaders from the UC service management market to learn more about where the industry is heading. Here are the highlights from our conversations with Nectar, Unify Square, Unimax, Virsae, and VOSS.

The challenges of the unified communications space are constantly growing, particularly as conversations become more complex. As we move into the cloud and experiment more with things like work-from-home landscapes, companies are turning to service management for help with visibility and quality control.

Service Management solutions also play an important role in improving security and reliability within the communication stack – two of the biggest concerns for today’s businesses. We asked our Service Management experts for an insight into how the SM landscape can help companies to overcome some common challenges today.

CEO of Unimax, Phil Moen said that companies need to address the challenge of finding the intermediator system that turns service requests into positive experiences. To do this, businesses need to turn to experts that understand how to deliver the right results.

“In other words, if the request has to do with changing a voicemail password or provisioning a complete collaboration user, turn to the experts in that area who know how to do this and depend on their systems to be that intermediator.”

There are hundreds of collaboration and telecom requests to manage in business. It’s imperative, because of this, that the intermediator system available is capable of understanding those requests. The system also needs to be able to make the right changes and take actions without human intervention.

“The selection of an intermediator vendor that understands those kinds of service requests should be based on the vendor’s experience and success with existing clients to achieve this sort of automation.”

VOSS CEO, Mike Frayne said that VOSS is taking a unique approach to serving companies in the current landscape. The business offers a highly integrated UC suite, complete with everything businesses need. This includes fulfillment, assurance, reporting, analytics, accounting, and migration in the same single pane of glass.

VOSS UC service management solutions automate technologies from different vendors, using a secure and flexible web portal. The self-healing capacity of the technology is particularly groundbreaking. It helps organisations to pull data from findings, analyse faults, and overcome issues fast. “This enables identified issues to be automatically corrected (e.g. re-configuration of IP-PBX, UC applications, SIP trunk, or gateways, etc.).”

Frayne said that the key feature of the self-healing solution is the zero-touch fault-rectification in the UC platform.