UC
There are some key consistencies among IT leaders who have rated their IP telephony and/or UC deployments successful. They rely upon a multi-faceted management strategy (devoting appropriate time to architect that strategy), leverage the tools in their kit, and demonstrate cost savings as a result of the management strategy.
First, successful deployments adopt a comprehensive management strategy, which includes multiple tools. The majority of companies (regardless of the successfulness of their deployment) leverage existing network and application performance tools, and the tools that come with their IP PBX. Successful deployments add third-party “specialty” tools to provide insight into asset management, change management, administrative functions, and IPT and UC performance. In fact, IT staffs add between one and six additional tools just to manage IP telephony/VOIP. They spend an average of $141,000 on tools, though larger companies spend up to $3 million. Some also use managed services to augment or completely replace the internal management strategy.
Second, IT leaders in companies with successful deployments leverage management and monitoring tools as much as possible. They want to automate operations and make the IT staff as productive as possible. To achieve that goal, they seek features such as automated and intelligent provisioning and intuitive reporting and analysis. Further, they look for tools that drill down into applications to document how the performance of one application—and of the network—affects the performance of another application. When a problem emerges, tools automating root-cause analysis can be key to isolating and resolving the problem quickly—saving budget by requiring a leaner staff to manage the technology. Tools providing some insight as to how an outage or slowdown affects business operations help IT staffs emphasize to the business leaders the cost of that outage—potentially justifying the cost of infrastructure upgrades, or new monitoring and management tools to help avoid, and so reduce the cost of, future outages.
Anecdotally, we have found problems take one to four times longer to isolate and resolve with IP telephony than they do with TDM in the first two to three years. With a solid management strategy in place, two key benefits emerge: 1.) The learning curve shortens from 24 to 36 months down to 12 to 18 months; and 2.) Isolating and resolving the problems typically takes less time (typically on the lower end of the metric).
The bottom line – make sure you are developing a VOIP/UC management strategy up-front. Look as well to partners who can provide external expertise and vendors who can integrate disparate applications.
