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What are the biggest trends in UC service management?
Mike Frayne, CEO, VOSS Solutions: “The main trend for VOSS is hyper-automation. As global economies worsen, companies need to respond again quickly to external influences.
“A UC platform that is agile and resilient is essential to deal with change – from supporting flexible working, using new technologies more quickly, and reducing costs in an environment of global economic uncertainty. .
“During the pandemic, organizations adopted UC solutions without a structured deployment plan, resulting in overlapping and unintegrated solutions. Now needing to reduce costs, organizations are looking at digitizing and expanding automation to justify their UC solutions.
“This will allow them to go beyond basic onboarding/offboarding to zero-touch workflows and integrations that absorb complexity, fuel productivity, improve the employee experience, and save costs.
“UC Observability is another exciting development that we support; the ability to proactively measure performance using telemetry, app metrics, logs, call metrics, flow, and synthetic testing, provides in -depth visibility into current and potential problem areas in the future. ”
David Levy, Director of Marketing in Akkadian: “As the number of unified communications products in use increases, provisioning and configuration workflows and labor intensive government become more complex, making IT management difficult for what is more. diverse, multi-vendor, and hybrid cloud/on-prem environments.
“UC’s service management vendors are releasing support for new platforms to address this change in the landscape.
“UC’s interoperability with other systems is critical because businesses don’t want their UC platforms to be degraded from other software.
“UC solutions may need to retrieve information from or provide data to other systems. Integrations with call tracking, call analytics, E911, call recording, CRM, HRIS, IT service management (ITSM) and more are needed to meet this challenge.
“UC’s service management solutions can be the hub that connects all of these diverse systems and ensures that UC platforms don’t exist in loops.”
Dessi Schachne, Vice President, Marketing at Kurmi Software, Inc .: “Right now, the three biggest trends we see at UC are multi-vendor environments, migration of UC systems to the cloud, and interoperability.
“In a post-pandemic world, few large companies rely on a vendor or a collaboration platform to strengthen hybrid work. The implementation of multi-vendor, modular UC makes it easier to replace old elements, add of the best features, and ensure business continuity.
“UC service management providers that have traditionally been associated with a particular vendor or technology now need to expand capabilities and offer integrations with UC vendors and, in particular, with IT systems such as HRIS and ITSM platforms.
“These two trends, along with increasing UCaaS adoption — where almost all organizations host at least part of their UC infrastructure in the cloud — are driving the need for interoperability and assistance with transfers.
“This is where UC’s service management tools come in. Companies that want to connect their platforms and interact with each other, or want to ease the burden of transfers, use tools like Kurmi Unified Provisioning . ”
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How is AI used to improve service management at UC?
Mike Frayne, CEO, VOSS Solutions: “It should be self -healing. The holy grail of managing a UC platform is the ability to spot issues early and then resolve these issues with as little human intervention as possible. It only does this by self -healing.
“Integrating tracking solutions that provide actionable insights into the UC platform and providing AI and machine learning solutions supports automated resolution.
“Problems are identified through monitoring solutions, AI and other rule -based logic; evaluates the issue to determine the optimal resolution, and then the provisioning engine implements the specified solution-and we have self-healing!
“Self-healing delivers enhanced user experiences and SLAs and reduces downtime and costs.
“Established VOSS monitoring and delivery solutions are constantly being expanded to deliver automated self-healing workflows that require minimal-to-no human intervention.”
David Levy, Director of Marketing in Akkadian: “AI for service management at UC is in the early stages of the impact of commercially available products.
“AI and other automation techniques are clearly needed as components of UC’s service management technologies to adapt to the growing size and complexity of the UC stack.
“Especially considering the competitive environment for hiring and retaining highly qualified UC engineers, the need for AI and automation to reduce manual workloads is affecting future product development roadmaps. UC service management.
“The predictive capabilities of AI will certainly be used in new and inventive ways to provide a streamlined operating system.
“For example, when a new employee completes a basic onboard task, AI within service management can identify third-party tools, such as CRM, HRIS, Identity Management and others, that typically require data from the issuance process (such as a new phone number), and through mergers, be able to send and receive data as needed. ”
Dessi Schachne, Vice President, Marketing at Kurmi Software, Inc.: “AI is becoming more critical in the UC industry, specifically in Contact Centers, as it helps free up time for employees to do their jobs more efficiently while developing a better customer experience.
“From an end-user point of view, AI is used to enable new features on UC platforms such as speech-to-text transcription, meeting recording, and translations.
“IT admins use AI to automate processes such as answering common user questions, monitoring system performance, or advising what services and configurations are right for each user, based on active user information. directory.
“AI also allows UC service management providers to access information from third-party devices to, for example, track how and how often employees are in meetings or how meeting rooms and devices, to discover trends and help employees work more efficiently. ”
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How can service management tools be used to help navigate the challenges of hybrid work?
Mike Frayne, CEO, VOSS Solutions: “In a hybrid workforce, productivity needs to be intrinsically linked to a positive user experience.
“In such strong competition for worker talent, your people need to be as happy as they are productive. For this, insight and actionable intelligence in their use at UC is key.
“Your service management provider should be able to offer UC automation and UC performance management for UC multi-vendor technologies from one point of control.
“It will give you a clear insight into the communication and collaboration experience of your employees. It will also give you the power to make better decisions and take early action that allows your people to thrive and set their business apart from the competition.
“On the productivity side: gain insight into application usage and adoption rates across multiple vendors; perspective on employee productivity, application, region, business unit; insight into areas that need coaching or learning support.
“On the experience side: give staff the latest tools to be productive and communicate effectively and empower them to easily switch between multiple vendor applications in a seamless digital workplace experience, regardless of their location. ”
David Levy, Director of Marketing in Akkadian: “Hybrid work or a combination of work-from-home and work-in-office has become the preferred work situation.
“All your collaboration capabilities in the office, you must be at home. The knowledge worker’s experience must be seamless.
“A multi-vendor, unified point of control for the entire UC stack of an enterprise is needed to keep pace with the increasing use of multiple UC tools as hybrid work accelerates.
“By using the provisioning automation features of a modern UC service management tool, UC engineers can reduce the headaches (from manual work) and risks (of interference with service or even loss) associated with global moves, additions, changes, and deletions (MACDs), allowing engineering talent to spend more time on broader strategic initiatives. ”
Dessi Schachne, Vice President, Marketing at Kurmi Software, Inc.: “With hybrid work firmly established as part of the future of work, IT teams need the support of an effective UC automation tool to reduce waste, increase efficiency, and ensure more productive use of IT.
“Providing new users, for example, or managing moves, changes and deletions, can be very manual and costly for a company. In addition, IT teams may need to juggle several UC platforms and migrate to cloud services. Service management tools simplify this complexity.
“With a tool like Kurmi’s, you can integrate administration from a glass pane, allow delegation (role-based access control) and zero-touch provisioning, and be flexible enough to integrate with applications such as ServiceNow, BMC, or Workday.
“Improving the operations of these workflows is now essential to keep businesses competitive and employees happy.”