Unified communication platforms are fast becoming a central hub for businesses that embrace hybrid work.
As part of a broader software ecosystem, they give employees the ability to work wherever they are at the time they choose.
But while these applications help define the future of work, there is a risk that businesses could create a separate environment of fragmented systems. Doing so can impede the employee experience and generate a mountain of tasks for IT administrators.
Akkadian helps businesses address this challenge with its core product Akkadian Provisioning Manager.
Provisioning Manager is perhaps best known for its ability to automate moves, additions, modifications and deletions (MACDs) on UC platforms such as Cisco Collaboration, Webex and Microsoft Teams. However, it extends its capabilities beyond collaboration platforms, reaching related areas such as call tracking, analytics, E911, call recording, CRM, HRIS, IT service management and more. pa.
In essence, the benefits provided by the Provisioning Manager to IT admins when it comes to collaboration platforms can be extended to other areas, making it a nucleus for integrating a diverse range of IT systems.
These benefits are centered on automation-eliminating IT departments of mundane, repetitive, manual tasks and giving them time to focus on more complex responsibilities.
“The Akkadian Provisioning Manager can be the hub that connects all these diverse systems and ensures that UC platforms do not exist in loopholes,” he said. David Levy, Director of Marketing at Akkadian Labs said UC Today.
“Businesses don’t want their UC platforms to be unobtrusive from other software. UC solutions may need to extract information from or provide data to other systems.”
Two examples that span the Akkadian ethos are its native integrations with ServiceNow and Microsoft Active Directory – two platforms that countless businesses rely heavily on.
These integrations mean that IT teams can initiate workflows on either of the two platforms to expand into a UC system.
For example, when the HR department registers a new employee and creates a ServiceNow ticket to provide certain UC applications, the Provisioning Manager can automatically set up the required phone, device, messaging account, etc. with Cisco Collaboration, Webex or Microsoft Teams – without any action from the UC administrator.
This process is two-way, meaning the collaboration platforms can also provide information back to Active Directory and ServiceNow through the Akkadian Provisioning Manager.
It’s important to highlight that this works throughout an employee’s tenure, not just when joining a new business. Akkadian estimates that on average most employees have 1.2 MACD per year, which, in a company with tens of thousands of employees, can result in a large number of low workloads for its IT staff.
“This will take us to the Holy Grail of UC provisioning automation,” Levy said.
“This is the full-cycle, both-ways, zero-touch provisioning that UC engineers are looking for.”
“They don’t want to engage in day-to-day, manual, high-volume tasks. They want those tasks to be automated so they can focus on more strategic and impactful projects-especially in today’s environment when it’s hard to get UC engineers. ”
ServiceNow and Active Directory may be the most common integration that Akkadian customers ask for. However, Provisioning Manager also has the ability to host a host of other integrations via its RESTful API. It allows businesses to plug in platforms such as the Workday and Oracle PeopleSoft HR platforms. Like ServiceNow and Active Directory, these tools can be used to initiate workflows in a business’s UC systems.
Elsewhere, the Provisioning Manager API Triggers feature can be set up to respond when a provision is made in a UC system. For example, if a salesperson just set up with a new phone number, the trigger can automatically update his or her Salesforce account with this new information.
The ultimate goal of Provisioning Manager from an interoperability perspective is to keep different platforms in sync and interact with each other-either through native ServiceNow and Active Directory integrations or API integrations that available to businesses to plug in a whole host of other platforms.
“We keep our architecture agnostic so it can communicate with all these different systems,” Levy said.
“One of the Akkadian tag lines is‘ we make things simple, seamless and unified ’.
“We don’t want UC platforms to exist in a loop; we also want them to have two-way communication with all these other systems. ”