Organizations today have many options when it comes to their UC services, and the devices they use to consume those UC services. No longer are businesses limited by the technologies located within their premise – they can now have their services hosted in the cloud.
Unified Communications is quickly moving to a “per-seat, per-month” consumptive cloud and hybrid model, where barriers to entry and adoption are low—and the perceived value of “pay-for-use” is high. This shift to a UC-as-a-Service (UCaaS) consumptive model has broad implications for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) competing in this growing sweet spot.
As more and more organizations transition to next generation communication networks, they are quickly finding out that today’s networks are becoming more and more complex. Today’s UC networks are built off of a multi-vendor architecture and enables multimodal communications that can be accessed from anywhere, corporate LAN, home network, mobile network or even public WiFi.
The shift from traditional telephony platforms to Unified Communications (UC) has put organizations in more of a consumption model, which is causing a shift in how UC is supported. The concept of a call server or PBX is really going away, as all the functions of a UC environment – voice, video and collaboration – are more and more distributed. This trend causes server monitoring and availability to be de-emphasized.
Xerox Business Services, LLC (Xerox) provides IT Outsourcing (ITO) managed services for everything from data centers to desktops to networks to voice to midrange mainframes for Fortune 500 companies. As clients increasingly turned to Xerox Services for help in implementing and managing VoIP, UC, and converged voice networks, John Truetken, Director of Network Architecture for Xerox ITO knew significant changes in their manual support model would be needed if they were to successfully expand their voice management services to meet their clients’ changing technology environments. John identified the ReliaTel VoIP and UC Management solution from Tone Software as a technology that would move the Xerox Services voice services business forward.
As the effects of natural disasters are felt all over the world, I can’t help but reflect on the importance of Communications especially during times of disaster. Business Continuity requires visibility, availability, reliability and redundancy to ensure the entire organization is kept well informed during emergencies. Are remote locations healthy and available or are services potentially degrading to prevent remote employees from being productive? When the business must reprioritize functions between different geographic territories, are the communications networks successful in handling the increased workload for service quality and throughput?
We recently announced key ReliaTel features and introduced a new Dashboard interface that benefits both management and operations.
If the mere mention of MOS (Mean Opinion Score) conjures up some high level sales terminology that’s meant to gloss over the details and provides little impact to troubleshooting VoIP QoS, then don’t worry because you are not alone. Over the past few years, I’ve noticed a growing trend amongst our technology peers who have similar feelings when discussing MOS as a factor of visibility to VoIP networks. Most anecdotal responses to my queries of dismissal end in “…I can’t fix my network using MOS.” So I ponder the dismissal; Has the audience expertise surpassed the oversimplified value of MOS? Has MOS outgrown it’s value in how we operate our VoIP networks? or is there something more subtle creating the perception of dismissal?
