The Real-World Benefits of UC Management Tools

IT leaders responsible for unified communications (UC) strategy and operations face ever-increasing complexity. The majority of companies are migrating some portion of their communications applications to the cloud, often while still maintaining on-premises platforms and their own PSTN connectivity. Hybrid work and the integration of voice and video into desktop and mobile applications has made it more difficult to manage end-to-end performance due to loss of network control. And, voice and video are increasingly business critical for both employee and customer engagement. As companies continue migrating from on-premises to cloud-based services, and as the number of different communications and collaboration platforms increase, IT leaders must take a proactive approach to managing their UC applications and services. By doing so, they can avoid finger-pointing between app providers, network administrators, and SIP trunking providers. This, in turn, ensures they can mix and match technologies to deliver the most business value while minimizing operating costs and complexity. Use of third-party specialty UC management tools delivers real-world benefits by increasing visibility into voice and video performance, reducing time required for management tasks, and allowing distribution of management, across multiple UC platforms. To optimize UC management, IT leaders should:

• Deploy specialty third-party administrative, performance, and network management tools that deliver unified visibility into performance of multiple applications
• Consider tools that unify administration, performance, and network management and that support AI for automation, fault isolation, and recovery
• Integrate management tools into IT service management, employee onboarding, identity management, and other platforms to reduce operational overhead
• Ensure that management tools support not only UC applications, but also underlying network services as well as PSTN connectivity