- Focus on: Multiple technologies and multiple vendors
- Integrated Research
The potential reach of UC portfolios is wide. As they evolve and spread they will touch multiple people across multiple locations and utilize multiple technologies; and present multiple dilemmas when it comes to managing them.
Although performance data may be available across individual technologies and vendor platforms, it cannot be easily correlated. This means that you cannot tell how the performance of one technology is affecting another. In fact by the time you do achieve some degree of correlation by comparing information from different management interfaces, each with its own terminology, functions and features; the conditions that caused the issue in the first place will have changed. And you may be none the wiser!
This white paper looks at the dilemmas of:
- Managing multiple technologies
- Managing multiple vendor platforms
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I think this paper highlights a vital and sometimes overlooked part of ensuring the success of evolving and deployed UC infrastructure portfolios. Businesses can be so focused on achieving the UC productivity improvements they seek; they over look how they will ensure visibility into disparate components’ performance to ensure that success.
Sue Bradshaw, the paper’s author, highlights that this lack of visibility means you won’t know if the performance of any of these technologies is affecting a UC application’s functionality. I asked her to give me an example to explain this.
One of UC’s key goals is to allow people to communicate using a variety of media types. For example, you can receive a voicemail message and choose to access it through e-mail or cell phone. If the sender is online according to Presence information and currently accepts calls, the response can be sent immediately through a cell, IM or video call. Alternatively, it may be sent as a non real-time message like email.
In just describing one ‘simple’ user interaction within UC we have already mentioned six technologies!
1. Voicemail
2. Email
3. Mobility
4. Presence
5. Instant Messaging
6. Video
If any one of these technologies is unavailable or overloaded and cannot respond in time, the whole process may break. And although the variety of technologies available today makes it easier to find a way round a problem than in the past; the fundamental advantage of streamlining communications and providing choice is compromised.
And, as an IT administrator you won’t know about the problem until one or more users calls you in frustration. But it doesn’t have to be that way. All the information you need to manage these technologies is there, potentially at your fingertips, if you can just put it together in a useful way.