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UC Solutions Must Be Monitored and Managed for Peak Performance

  By Laura Stotler, TMCnet Contributing Editor

Unified communications solutions and platforms have long been touted as a panacea for business collaboration. And UC products and services have indeed become an entrenched part of the communications market, replacing expensive and difficult to maintain legacy phone systems and traditional PBXs. But UC offerings are not without their own problems and one of the most pervasive issues is a lack of consistent quality.

According to Gartner (News - Alert), enterprise customers routinely report they are disappointed by the quality and capabilities of both the audio conferencing and videoconferencing features of Skype (News - Alert) for Business. And while this may be an age-old problem for UC offerings, it opens up opportunities for service providers and network operators that want to distinguish themselves by offering a better quality of service.

High bandwidth and OTT services, coupled with a cloud and services-based on-demand technology landscape, are changing the way networks are architected and managed. Service providers who can offer high-speed, superior quality services flexibly and at an affordable price point will be the winners in this digital transformation. And UC services make up the bulk of enterprise traffic in this scenario, so delivering them correctly should be a priority for any competitive service provider.

Proper management and monitoring of all aspects of UC is essential to providing a high quality of service. Each voice and video interaction must be logged and analyzed to ensure quality levels are correct and consistent and that problems are mitigated and network resources adjusted accordingly. Collecting this information about UC services is not only key for service providers wanting to deliver consistent service, but offers a host of insight and metrics for businesses interested in controlling costs and monitoring quality of service.

Service providers should layer a monitoring solution onto their offerings that will collect all the vital information and organize it in reports that are useful to both network operators and enterprise customers. This ensures UC systems and networks alike are operating at peak performance and that customers are satisfied and having consistently positive user experiences.

UC solutions are the way of the future for business communications. But in order to reach their full potential, enterprise customers must have consistently high levels of quality and availability. Network and service providers can distinguish themselves by managing and monitoring UC solutions and traffic to ensure performance markers are being met and customers are satisfied with their offerings.