Managing UC in the Age of Cloud, Hybrid, and Multi-Vendor Deployments

Author: Irwin Lazar, President & Principal Analyst Not available for licensing. For many companies, the choice in deploying Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) platforms isn’t just cloud or on-prem, nor is it just office vs remote workers. Rather, it is, “Which mix of applications and services minimizes operational costs and maximizes productivity?” A hybrid assortment of platforms enables companies to support users where they work (fully remote, hybrid, or full-time in-office) with a much broader range of UC&C capabilities while minimizing operational costs. This hybrid UC&C ecosystem creates its own challenges, though—primarily how to best manage multiple platforms, both on-premises and cloud, and how to effectively support employees regardless of their work location. Organizations can achieve quantifiable benefit via the automation of complex workflows that are location, technology, and vendor agnostic using specialized tools for UC administration management. Metrigy research data, collected from more than 1,400 global participants for our Workplace Collaboration MetriCast 2023 study, shows that successful companies, using specialized UC administration management tools, achieve the following benefits:

• 36.9% reduction in operational management costs for their UC and contact center environments
• 46.4% reduction in initial user provisioning time
• 40.4% reduction in ongoing user management time

Therefore, Metrigy recommends that business and IT leaders evaluate UC&C administration platforms to reduce IT Infrastructure operating costs, improve speed of deployment, and streamline ongoing provisioning and management activities. Specifically, they should:

• Select a platform that is future-proof. This means one that natively supports current and planned UC&C platforms.
• Select a platform that is extensible; supporting integration with HR information systems, IT service management platforms, and enterprise directories, and that offers SDKs and APIs for greater operational functionality.
• Select a platform that is secure. Management platforms must support granular delegation of worker, task, and feature management by team members with different roles, including a self-service portal for the end user.
• Select a platform that saves time and money. Evaluate the impact of deployment to determine cost savings through optimized IT resource utilization and reduction of time spent on provisioning and ongoing management.

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Table of Contents

• Executive Summary
• The World Is Hybrid
• Key Challenges in Managing Hybrid UC Solutions
• The Need: Centralized UC&C Administration Management
• Business Benefits of Administrative Management Tools
• Picking the Right UC Administrative Management Tool
• Conclusions and Recommendations