Call Accounting Featured Article

UCC Management & Monitoring Tools Critical for Cost Savings

  By Laura Stotler, TMCnet Contributing Editor

Unified Communications (News - Alert) and Collaboration (UCC) solutions are being embraced wholeheartedly in businesses ranging from SMBs to enterprises, thanks to their myriad features, flexibility and relatively low price point compared to legacy offerings. But these solutions carry their own challenges, including steadily rising operations costs in some cases.

According to a new report from Nemertes Research, businesses that take advantage of management and monitoring tools when implementing UCC will realize a 59 percent reduction in operations costs along with a 34 percent increase in user adoption. Despite their inherent feature sets and capabilities, UCC offerings have complex architectures and integration requirements, particularly when it comes to hybrid deployments with a blend of cloud and on-premises components. Solutions that feature built-in management and monitoring capabilities give organizations the tools they need to keep systems up and running while realizing operational cost savings.

Nemertes found that a surprising 56.4 percent of the 300 organizations they surveyed do not leverage monitoring and management tools for operations, performance and event management, leading to spiraling costs in many cases. Of those businesses that do take advantage of call accounting, monitoring and management tools, most realized a reduction in their implementation costs, a reduction in staff managing IP telephony and UC offerings and increased adoption of UC throughout the organization.

Despite the challenges of hybrid UCC deployments, cloud collaboration is on the rise, according to MarketsandMarkets, with the global market expected to reach $42.57 billion by 2021, up from $23.39 billion last year. UCC makes up the biggest portion of the overall cloud collaboration market, thanks to features that enable groups of users to interact, coordinate tasks and share information in both real-time and non-real-time scenarios. Trends in BYOD and enterprise mobility are also contributing to UCC adoption, along with perceived reduction in IT expenses.

Organizations that want to glean the most value from their UCC solutions and realize that reduction in IT expenses must take advantage of UCC management and monitoring tools. In many cases, toolsets are built into comprehensive UCC platforms, giving companies everything they need to stay on top of call accounting, management and UC monitoring expenses. Failure to take advantage of these tools will typically result in rising operational costs, negating many of the positive benefits of switching to UCC in the first place.